


The Sweet Song of Time

by TinyFrost



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Consensual Sex, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Marriage, Neolithic AU, Sexual Confusion, Time Travel AU, hunter! Victor, physicist! Yuuri
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2019-10-31 19:46:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17855819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinyFrost/pseuds/TinyFrost
Summary: Katsuki Yuuri has spent the last years of his life inside physics labs, giving his life to have the honor of being placed next to the big names in the history of Science so when his academic life and success is walking on thin thread, he gives his best to fix a  machine which could make history, Not only for the world, but for himself.Vitka is the Petsk's Great Hunter, but no matter how many Manak bones hang around his neck as trophies of successful hunts, his Spirit feels empty and he only runs through the forests to bring food to his village and to teach the young. That until the Bright Mother sends her son to his village to guide them through a path of peace and to give Vitka's life full of happiness again.





	1. Chapter 1

If anyone saw the way Yuuri softly stirred the sugar at the bottom of his coffee cup, they would surely say he was grieving over a broken heart. And they would be sort of right. But it wasn’t his heart which sook console over a bitter and warm drink, but rather his pride and his will to keep on going.

“Yuuri!” a childlike voice brought him out of his trance. Yuuko was already rising a hand up to call for the waitress “You want another cup? That one must be cold already”

The young man blinked in confusion before denying softly “I’m good thanks”

“Anyone with two eyes can see that’s the biggest lie ever” Takeshi mocked next to Yuuko who didn’t waste a second on giving him a hit with her elbow, making him duck in pain.

“I said it yesterday and I will say it again” Phichit raised his head off his hot cocoa with a big white and foamy moustache which finally pulled a small smile off Yuuri’s lips “all he needs are some good days lying by the sea with a drink on his hand and maybe one of my friends by his side! A little time out of the lab doesn’t do bad to anyone, you know?”

Truth be told, Phichit _had_ been mumbling over and over again about inviting him to spend a few weeks at his family’s summer house in Phuket Island over the past week after what Yuuri considered to be the worst event in history… or at least of his now-done career. Phichit hadn’t been the only one either: when he had finally had the courage to call back home and tell his parents about the failure to the world of science that he was, his mother had immediately suggested for him to go back for a few weeks to Hasetsu over the summer break and have some katsudon, his father said they would always welcome him into the resort and his sister had simply mumbled an almost inaudible ‘Cheer up, lil’ bro’.

“Speaking of which, I should go back to the lab to clean my mess up.” he started to stand up from the cubicle, placing his bag over his shoulder while pulling out his wallet “Professor Cialdini said he wants that thing out of the lab by tomorrow”

“Tsk. You’re exaggerating, Celestino simply said he needs the lab for the freshmen’s open class on Monday” Phichit snorted, nevertheless, he stood up after his friend “You’re such a drama queen sometimes I wonder how great you would have been in a Theatre Major. I’ll help you clean”

“The machine is big, right?” Yuuko wondered, rising her hand again to ask for the bill “Takeshi can help moving the pieces if you want!”

Her boyfriend almost spit his own drink in surprise. But everyone in the table knew there was hardly anything he wouldn’t fulfill to his now fiancée, especially since she was pregnant.

Yuuri could thank his rugby-player muscles, though. Phichit and him being physicists meant that the strongest part of their bodies were their brains rather than any muscular fiber anywhere. Yuuko, despite her petite size and her mathematician mind, was stronger than them both combined but there was no way in hell or heaven they were going to make a pregnant woman do the heavy job. Literally.

Despite usually seeing each other while walking down the hallways, the four of them had formally met during their first meeting at the International Students’ Club of the Saint Petersburg University. Phichit and Yuuri had instantly clicked and became each other’s best friend to the point that by their second semester they had become roomies; thanks to her bubbly attitude, Yuuko had been quick to join their all-nighter study sessions in which most of the time she would correct their most complex equations while sharing snacks their families sent them from home.

Takeshi had actually joined their group when he had asked for help to make Yuuko notice him out of all the Russian and non-Russian students who were after her all the time. He really liked hanging with them but sometimes he just couldn’t grasp what the hell those Einstein-for-brains were talking about.

The lab at the Institute of Physics was as big as the college’s prestige, and it needed to be if it wanted to pay respect to the Nobel Prize winners who had stepped out of its walls. Yet, as much as grandiose it might be in the aesthetic sense, every student who had spent a few minutes of his life in there, knew the struggle, stress and pain that implied being enclosed in one of its rooms for either class, homework or project.

In Yuuri’s place, he had three full blackboards the height and width of the walls they hung on to prove it.

Surrounded by them, computers, about thirteen cardboard boxes filled to the top with equation-filled papers, wheelie chairs and some miscellaneous stuff borrowed from the Robotics dept, lied Yuuri’s final project in all its infamous splendor.

At first glance, it looked as if someone had glued together a pair of boxes: one made of solid metal and having all the façade of a set of Google-center computers with a small monitor and a keyboard to access to its system, and another one made of glass and carbon fiber which looked as an expensive showcase with a sort of claw on the top.

The idea was for the controller to insert a certain equation on the monitor followed by the subtraction of a determined number of years and a password, this action would cause a chemical and mechanical reaction which would be freed through the claw’s tubular channels and into the isolated ‘showcase box’.

What for? To make a small twist in the space-time which could be visible and study-able for mankind.

Or at least that had been the idea.

Yuuri had been working on that thing for the whole semester and five days before, he had thrown his hopes and grades out of the window when the only thing the machine did was nothing but a mere lighter-like spark. He had set himself too high for his own good.

“Oh wow!” Yuuko exclaimed in surprise when she entered the room “The last time I was here, the blackboard wasn’t _that_ full!”

Yuuri let out a giggle while he and Phichit placed their coats and bags on one of the chairs “Well, you have been kind of busy going to the gynecologist these days”

His friend smiled at her swollen belly. She was barely on her 22nd week but her belly already looked as if had been 9 months as she and Takeshi were expecting triplets. If him and her parents had lost their breaths when Yuuko announced her pregnancy, both her boyfriend and parents had almost fainted when she revealed they were going to be three babies.

“Still, it was fun hanging here” the girl admitted, siting on the wheelie chair her boyfriend offered her. Her eyes were still fixed on the blackboard walls “I could keep my applied math sharp helping you with those”

“Celestino also loved your help with Yuuri!” Phichit chirped from behind the machine where he had started to untangle some wires while Yuuri disconnected them “He says he always double-checked his operations when you were here”

Yuuri had always been good doing even the most complex of mathematical problems from a very early age. His anxiety, however, would sometimes get the best of his brain and made his hands and eyes make the dumbest mistakes ever: from forgetting to put the vertical line on a plus sign to confuse a number seven with a one.

“Ah… that would explain that mistake that annulation in the final track” Yuuko mumbled absentmindedly.

Despite the indifference of her tone, as soon as the words were out of her lips, Yuuri’s head raised up like a spring from behind the machine.

“What…?” his voice was barely audible in evident shock

Still sitting on the wheelie chair and gazed with confusion by Takeshi, her friend was pointing at the upper left corner of the third blackboard. The equation described how one of the chemical components needed to be activated through speed for its isotopes to react with another compound in a nuclear scale so their reaction could start the time-space twist.

Except that, in the equation, the compound didn’t activate itself, but it lowered its reactive power instead.

“My chem is not as good as it used to, but I’m pretty sure you annulated the reaction and oxidized the other component in there” she explained, Yuuri followed the line she described with her finger “After that, as you didn’t increase the speed, it ended being a neutral reaction…”

“YUU-CHAN YOU’RE A GENIOUS!” Yuuri exclaimed in pure joy “Phichit! I can fix it!”

The physicist was so happy he wasted no time and went to his backpack to pull out his notebook and calculator to start correcting his equation with the excitement of a kid in Christmas. Phichit went back to plug back all the wires while Yuuko helped Yuuri in high voice, her boyfriend staring at her in the awe of someone who understands how amazing their significant other is.

An un-drawn vertical line had been the cause of all his nightmares for an entire week!

“Yuuri are you he…?” a familiar voice came out of the lab’s door. Professor Celestino seemed to be shocked to find two of his students and their friends in the room “Oh, hey there kiddos”

“Professor!” the Japanese boy dropped the chalk he had been writing with and ran towards the professor with a smile he only let out whenever his mother placed a bowl of katsudon in front of his face “Yuuko found my mistake! I can fix it and have the machine running in no time!”

Celestino couldn’t even put down his leather bag before his excited student rushed him in front of the blackboard and set to explain Yuuko’s discovery and his own strategy to re-arrange most of his equations on the last track. There was no way it wouldn’t work!

“Pofessor, can I have another chance just this time?” Yuuri stared at him with the same wide eyes a puppy would use

The professor gave another look to the blackboard and to him.

“Well” Celestino relaxed his shoulders “grades will only be up until Monday, you know?”

What is left of the afternoon, the lab’s doors only open to let Takeshi out for cups of coffee and cookies on behalf of his fiancée and his friends who don’t take their eyes off the giant blackboards for more than five seconds. He even swears he can see the smoke coming out of their brains through their ears.

Celestino, Phichit and Yuuko were sitting like students would do, making counts and helping Yuuri to advance quickly with them. The Japanese young man was holding a small light blue notebook on his left hand while writing with the right one. The large chalk-drawn process on the blackboards is nothing but a mathematical translation of what is written in that little notebook.

He had written every single detail of his space-time experiment in those pages that weren’t longer than his phone’s length since he was still sitting under the kotatsu back at his family’s living room during the winter break.

“I could reduce the pressure, but then it would oxidize…”

“…now if you apply the Euler principle to this, the result should be…”

“I remember you said in that part you made a substitution…”

“…the range of that one is elevated to the previous atom. You’re missing two units”

“Someone wants more coffee?”

The sky is already dark outside of the building, but the small group inside doesn’t even consider paying attention to it or to the clock hanging on the back wall. How could they when Yuuri’s final equation is already written?

It’s probably the length of Yuuri’s forearm, short and beautiful in the physics perspective. His audience clapped in genuine joy.

“Omg, I can’t believe my bestie is the next Nobel prize winner!” Phichit squeaked

Yuuri’s face couldn’t contain neither the big proud smile nor the pink blush “I still have to know if this will actually work out”

The young physicist was slowly typing his equation into the monitor ever so carefully, trying to do so perfectly. Life and Professor Cialdini had given him a second chance so he better not mess it up.

“It will, kiddo” the professor gave Yuuri one of his tight and comforting shoulder grabs “You are about to make history! Phichit, why don’t you record this moment for the sake of mankind and science…?”

It didn’t even pass half a second before his friend pulled his phone out of his pocket with a loud ‘YES SIR!’ and set himself into a filming pose. Yuuko and Takeshi pushed their wheelie chairs in front of the machine and he even got one for Celestino to enjoy the show.

Yuuri gave it all one last look. Machine plugged, containers ready, pressure indexes ready, speed levels ready, containing barriers ready, inserted equation ready, Phichit doing an Instagram live ready, professor Cialdini ready, Yuuko and Takeshi excited for the show ready. Himself? Ready to make history!

He took a deep breath to ease down his heart from all the cheering happening behind his back, pressed ‘Enter’ on the keyboard and set his hand to softly push the small lever which would free the chemical components from their pressured containers.

That was when all the red alarms in his head started to ring. He had forgotten something, and it wasn’t until the lever was only two millimeters away from activating the whole system that he could remember what it was: the security timer. Without it, the machine would activate immediately, and he wouldn’t have time to set himself to a safe distance from suffering any kind of negative after effects.

But it was too late before his brain commanded his hand to stop.

Yuuri wouldn’t know if it had been an effect of the machine or if it were his own senses trying to avoid the unavoidable, but time seemed to relent. He had time to see Celestino’s proud expression, Phichit’s excited face while he talked to his Instagram viewers and Yuuko and Takeshi’s wide-eyed excitement.

The last thing he felt with his last traces of full consciousness, was how he felt his brain fry like a pork cutlet.

 

* * *

Vitka was awfully bored.

Hunting would usually pump his spirits up as soon as he stepped into the forest, excitement and concentration would flow in his veins while he followed the trace of his prey but it would also fill his soul with respect, humility and peace while he performed the ritual of giving thanks to the animal for giving its life so life in his village could go on.

Hunting was good so one would think being a hunting teacher would also be wonderful, but he had forgotten who was to be his pupil.

“Agh!” Yur’chka complained next to him, the chirps of fleeing birds following his words.

Vitka didn’t even need to turn his head to know the kid had stuck his arrow on the tree trunk rather than on one of the bird’s chest. He sighed for what should be the eighteenth time in the day. He could make the exact same correction he had been doing all day, but he knew his pupil would simply ignore the advice just as he had done so far.

“Let’s go home” the kid made a deaf thump when he sat violently next to him, throwing his bow away from him “I’m done with this”

Vitka picked up the wooden weapon, muttered a short prayer which ended with a gentle touch of his forehead to the mushy forest ground and stood up with his head still bowing with respect.

“You forgot to thank for this lesson” he told his student off. The angry grumbles behind his back made Vitka sure the kid had listened.

The way back to the village where their people lived was a track Vitka really enjoyed. Eight trees with a special mark made by the Petsk people had to be passed through before arriving to a small waterfall, they had to pass two others of those until a marsh was visible. A boat and a pair of rows awaited, for them so they could travel along the river. The Petsk village was located far enough from the river so clouds of mosquitoes wouldn’t attack during the summer but close enough so the walk towards the boats wasn’t so tiring in the early mornings.

All of the homes were built in the exact same structure and size: a circular construction in the soft and pale color the marsh herbs would turn into when the Snow was only a few moons away from their village, the Petsk would mix them with mud and mold them over wooden supports until they achieved thick, slightly irregular and with some cleavages carved on them for some objects to be placed. In the center, made in the same paste, stood a small oven with more of warming intention rather than baking, for that they had larger ovens everyone could use.

Just like the ovens, the Petsk had built a larger house for their healer and magician, around which all of the others stood. It was bigger than the others so Lili’ya could perform rituals, tend the ill or wounded and office the Bondings along her Cared, Ya’Kov, who had once been the Petsk’s Great Hunter.

Yurch’ka lived with his Great Father in the house he had built for him and his Cared when he was young, so it wasn’t that far from the healer’s house. On the other hand, Vitka lived on his own in the house his Mother and Father had built in the outskirts. A home too big for just one.

Sometimes, to ease the emptiness, Vitka would collect interesting things he would find along his hunting trips or his walks down the streams with Makka. His walls were quite full of furs which were too small to use on clothes, colorful feathers he had found in the forest, stones in other tones as those of the North caves he would find them at in his occasional trips which he would sometimes turn into beads and even seashells he brought back from the journey the Petsk made to the Sun Lands every Winter. In fact, in that moment he was awfully curious if he could soon add a new item to his collection

“You want to go pick flowers?” Yurch’ka scandalized with a piece of dried meat between his teeth

They had stopped for a little bite before rowing their way back to the village. Vitka had just learned a new method from Lili’ya to ensure a plant to keep its color and he wanted to try it on one of the Ground Skies.

“You know they only bloom like three or four times before the Winter comes and I really want to see if I can make them keep their color” Yurch’ka rolled his eyes turning their usual bright green into a fed up white “Listen this, I’ll trade you this visit to the Sky Grounds for a non-lesson of fishing. How’s that?”

Of course, the kid immediately agreed: the Sky Grounds weren’t that far after all. After tying their boats safely with the others, they walked up the narrow wooden pier but instead of taking the lane to the right leading to the small forest their village stood up, they took the one to the left which lost itself further the smooth hills at the back of the marsh; behind them, the ground ceased to be its normal tone of green and allowed small, simple, delicate flowers to color it the same as the sky. Hence the name.

“How many do you think I should pick?” Vitka wondered, holding an armful of flowers. He could put them inside the hunting pouch on his back if it wasn’t full of a deer legs.

“Well, you say you’re going to be doing experiments with them and considering your klutz self, the you should probably pick the entire field” Yurch’ka mocked, sitting on one of the hills apart from the flower field.

Vitka didn’t listened to his words and tied the stems together with one of the threads intended for their ditched fishing lessons, they started to make their way back to the village in a quiet silence. Mosquitoes weren’t a bother yet so the only sound flooding their ears was the cicada’s soft song.

“Say Yura,” the older man broke the silence just a few meters away from his home where they would leave most of their stuff before lending Yurch’ka back to his Great Father “do you feel something weird in the air?”

The blond kid let out a puzzled ‘huh?’ before darting his eyes through the dark sky and then moving his pointy nose sniffing the night air. Vitka had let his improvised bouquet and hunting pouch on the ground with one swift movement while getting his bow an arrow ready to attack with the same grace and speed. His icy blue eyes scanned the dark cautiously: something had come too dangerously close to his village.

“I don’t smell a thing” Yurch’ka mumbled on his side, grabbing his bow as well with less mastery “Are you sure you…wait”

The smell was suddenly stronger. And it was the strangest thing ever to rose Vitka’s nostrils.

“Bow and arrow ready, Yura” the hinter advised to his student who gave a mute nod in response.

The scent was not bad, just plain weird. It had the same aroma as that of something being left over the fire for too long until it turned into coal, but the background of the scent was not that of a hearth, but rather that of a cruel winter night out in the forests with a wind so freezing it burns the skin until it leaves it deadly purple.

An eye-striking light shone before their eyes, as if someone had lit up a white fire in the middle of the air followed by an invisible body which threw Vitka and Yurch’ka away with such strength both hunters let their weapons go and were left with no air in their bodies.

Vitka immediately stood up, ready to face their enemy but there was no one to stick his arrows with but…

He squinted his sky-blue eyes at what seemed to be a sack laying a few steps apart from them, but it had a very human shape to him. The hunter approached the curious figure cautiously and holding his bow ready to shoot. Yet, when he was only a step away from it, he put his weapon down.

It clearly was a person just like him and his apprentice but, maybe it was his vision blinded by the lack of the Bright Father, he couldn’t see any sense of familiarity to the Petsk or to the other tribes he knew of. The person laying before him was strange for everything the Bright Mother could show: the body was wrapped in strange cloths in colors which were impossible to find in the fur of any known animal, he had no visible weapons on him, his hair wasn’t styled in the way the Petsk did but closer to the Almas in the grass plains near the Summer Lands but, what called Vitka’s attention the most, was the color of the hair itself.

“Great Mother shining in the skies…” Vitka mumbled in awe

Amongst the Petsk, the most common hair was that of the dried marsh grass like Yurch’ka but there also were the one of dried leaves before Winter like Lili’ya, the color of a warm hearth like Mila or even the color of the wood pillars in the forests like the Alma people. Vitka was a curious case but not a rare one though it was way more common amongst the Sammi in the Always Winter Lands.

But someone with the color of the sky in which the Bright Mother stood? That was something completely unheard of.

Vitka lightly poked the body with one of the ends of his bow but ended turning the face towards the hunter himself and he almost tried to shoot again. He had some kind of thin branches below the forehead and standing on the nose. Maybe some kind of amulet? Or the sign of a healer from another tribe?

“What?” Yurch’ka interrupted his thoughts “Are we gonna kill her or carry her to Lili’ya?”

Her?

Vitks gave the body before him a second glance, moved into curiosity by his pupil. The stranger’s clothes were much lighter than the pelts covering his and Yurch’ka’s bodies, so it was easy to distinguish a small waist and curvy hips but there was no sign of breasts on the chest. However, his hair was styled like the Alma men and there was something masculine about the face.

If he couldn’t get this right, he wouldn’t be able to say if it was a friend or an enemy. But Lili’ya would know.

“We take it with us” Vitka concluded, crouching to carry the body in his arms before his pupil’s copious complaints, but as soon as he passed his fingertips under the torso he jumped back. It was burning in fever.

The hunter placed his hand on the pale forehead, immediately feeling the dampness of cold sweat only to perceive the excessive warmth coming off the skin. However, Vitka wasn’t prepared for the moment the person beneath his hand opened his eyes.

It was extremely subtle, but Vitka knew he wasn’t going to easily erase that vision from his memory.

The warm pools gazed at him with the color of dark honey and were luminous like the last traces of the Bright Father before ceding pass to his beloved and made Vitka feel the same as if he was standing next to a hearth in the middle of the winter. It only lasted a moment before the person closed its eyes with evident tiredness.

Vitka only rushed himself into carrying the body to Lili’ya.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Katsuki Hiroko was a woman who tried to hold a positive attitude to every little rainy-day life offered to her.

And that attitude was even greater when it came to her children, as she always wanted to not only be there for whenever they needed her but to also make a conscious effort to understand whatever they were going through.

Like when Mari started to ditch dolls and secretly use his little brother’s videogames, or when Yuuri would start to neglect his toys in favor of curiously studying the garden’s leaves under his microscope, or that more extreme time when Mari decided College and an specific career just weren’t what she was looking for in life and opted to take multiple online courses with no-relation whatsoever but which made her happy.

But if she was being honest with herself, Hiroko would definitely say the time her motherly instinct had been challenged the most had been when Yuuri told her and Toshiya he wanted to study abroad in the far away Saint-Petersburg.

Yuuri had sat both her and Toshiya one snowy afternoon announcing the last days of fall. The dining room was quiet like it would usually be before the winter guests come in to enjoy the warmth of the hot springs. The youngest Katsuki starts his speech with a shy demeanor but his words grow progressively more and more passionate while he told them about the University, the scholarships he could get, the Nobel prizes who had been in there and the amazing job opportunities he would have if he graduated from there.

“I can get a scholarship for both academic and dorm fees, the college has a lot of ties with Japanese government so I could get tutoring to get in remotely” Yuuri was even getting short of breath at that point of his speech. He stopped for a moment to get some air in his lungs and glanced at his parents with a mix or seriousness and nervousness

“Ka-san, To-san. I know that so far I’ve only given you work but, I can’t think of something that I want more than this…”

Her son’s voice had tuned shy once again but in her motherly understanding, she knew no words were needed anymore.

The Katsuki household then turned all of their efforts to support their youngest’s dream: all the surplus from the inn was directed to a college account in the bank, Toshiya’s soccer jerseys passed to a second place, Mari would also put the tips customers gave her to the cause much to her brother’s dismay. Yuuri spent his last years of high school working part time in a café downtown Hasetsu and as a skating teacher in the local rink.

All of it proved to be only the prelude to the real thing.

During Yuuri’s first semester away, Hiroko still made food for four, went into his bedroom to wake him up, called for his help in the kitchen and even caught herself thinking of making _katsudon_ in the weekends for him. Calls and videocalls were never enough but her motherly heart eased a little bit.

But what kind of mother expects to be told her son has disappeared?

No matter how many times the police and the college’s authorities shown her his son disappearing in a flash of light in a monitor, her brain couldn’t wrap itself around it.

“I… I don’t understand” Hiroko mumbled

She had seen the same video in the morning news through the T.V. The presenter had called it an event for history to remember as one of the greatest advances in the world of physics: a boy in Saint Petersburg had basically opened a breach in space-time and all she had thought was is the boy would be a classmate to her Yuuri.

Not that it _was_ her Yuuri.

The translator, a young man from Tokyo interchanged a few words with a lot of z’s and sh’s with a man pale as milk. The pale man talked directly at her, his voice immediately followed by the young man’s.

“We have been questioning the four witnesses for twenty-four hours but they all say the same” the young man’s voice seemed distant “This was an experimental project made by your son, he didn’t take safety precautions and, according to the witnesses, he might have entered to a space-time alteration… whatever that means”

‘Whatever that means’ was a right choose of words. But that wasn’t something which could ease her heart or mind. The pale man spoke something else at her and her husband’s back.

“Ma’am, we need you to tell us anything your son ever mentioned about it about this project of your son” the translator mumbled “We have the Physics departments of the top Russian labs and universities working to solve this, but our information is far from complete”

Hiroko mechanically nodded and stood up to open her son’s study to the pale man and the small group following him. She left them scattering amongst Yuuri’s papers, boxes and the desk computer under the vigilant eyes of her daughter and husband.

Then she retired to her own room and locked the door. Tears didn’t make themselves wait for too long.

 

* * *

 

 

For the Petsk, being a Great Hunter was a matter of honor, respect, sanctity, effort, responsibility and bravery rather than brute force and a big number of killed preys. Great Hunters were visible from a young age in which they would pay respect to the life in the forests neighboring their village instead of deliberately harming it like most of the children would do.

Vitka remembered how much he cried when he found a bird with its wing broken underneath one of the Path Trees and his Father told him the wound was too bad and the best thing to do was to give it back to the Great Mother Earth. His cries went even louder and stronger, claiming that there wouldn’t be a need to kill it if he took good care of it the way he did with Makka but his Father explained to him that the Great Mother Earth gave life to _live_ it and for a bird, life was useless if they couldn’t be in the arms of the Great Father Sky. The Great Mother would give it a home in her until the Bright Lights came to take it to the Otherplace.

He remembered he closed his eyes the moment his Father took his bone knife out and he closed them even tighter when he heard the sound of an alarmed chirp followed by the one of the air being slashed. Then, silence.

The exact same memory came straight to his mind when Great Hunter Ya Kov decided he had had enough of shooting in a static place and took him into the forest to hunt his first prey. The Winter wasn’t that far away so the birds had eaten a lot to get through the tiring journey, but they hadn’t moved to the Sun Lands yet. That meant they would be big, fulfilling and tasty.

“I don’t want to do it” he complained during the entire walk towards the forest

“Vitka, you will soon be eight winters old, it won’t be long until you become a man.” there was no sweetness in the Great Hunter’s voice when he said his name unlike other times “Then you will have to leave Lili-ya’s care and go back to the house your Father built: how will you eat if you don’t know how to hunt? If you don’t learn how to take care of the Great Mother so she offers you her fruits?”

Vitka let out a muffled sob.

“But they are alive…like me” at that point he didn’t remember if he was crying on the perspective of having to kill a bird or because he had remembered his late Father’s words.

Ya Kov’s expression had softened and the Great Hunter was now kneeling on the ground, so his eyes were at the same level as the child’s.

“Listen, Vitka” he felt his small, bony shoulders being held by big, calloused hands “A hunter is not a killer, we do it because we need to live as well but we always make sure to take just what we _need_ and then we have to make sure to use everything we asked. That’s why we offer a prayer to the the Great Mother and her children, we promise to take care for what we take and to offer something in exchange”

That day, Vitka helped Lili-ya prepare and cook his first meal as a hunter: a large goose which he shared with Lili-ya and Ya Kov. After cleaning the prey, the healer had given him one of the largest feathers she had pluck out of the animal, it was a good luck charm for his future hunts.

Winters had passed, each striping Vitka off his childhood and bringing a little bit more of a man in exchange until, when he was fifteen Winters old, Lili-ya predicted he would be the one to take a Manak’s life during a hunt instead of her Cared. When he came back to the Petsk village with his spear dripping the magnificent beast’s blood, Lili-ya made him damp his palm in it and press it in the Hunter’s Cave along with Ya Kov and the old Great Hunters. He was one of them.

Most kids around the village believed that being a Great Hunter just implied to be heroic during the hunts, get the finest pelts, have a necklace decorated with bones and fangs but, like Vitka at their age, they ignored the responsibility that came with the honor.

A Great Hunter had to make sure the _entire_ village was well fed. It was on his shoulders that if a woman whose Cared had gone to Otherplace during a hunt, an old man who didn’t have any descendants or an orphaned child weren’t able to look for food, he was to hunt for them.

During the walk to the Sun Lands each Winter, he had to be the protective eyes for all the Petsk. His spear, knives and arrows were ready to defend his people for any threats they found along the way. His people would then make sure he was comfortable at the Sun Lands.

The teaching of the Hunt was his responsibility as well. Parents and Lili-ya would send children to him so he and other of the village’s best hunters would initiate the younger Petsk in the use of both weapons and prayers they would use when they grew up and had to cooperate with the feeding of their families and village.

Vitka had all these responsibilities translated in daily tasks but he just couldn’t seem to concentrate on any.

He had burnt his breakfast, almost sliced one of the pelts he was curating, ended up tying wrongly the feathers on his arrows, he was close to break one of his spears and he missed his morning lesson with Yurch-ka… two days in a row.

“Are you sick?” the younger Petsk wondered when he came into Vitka’s house, wondering why he hadn’t meet him at the entrance of the village to set off to the forest.

Vitka denied with his head, but his forehead frowned. Maybe he wasn’t ‘sick’ but rather ‘unwell’, he had been like that since the previous night when he had arrived to the village with what he had thought was a dead person on his arms until Lili-ya had assured him that, as strange as that person looked with all his weird garments and accessories, he was just passed out and had a little fever. The Healer had enclosed herself in her home, forbidding anyone to open the door or the man would only get worse if the Night longed her cold fingers towards him.

“I’ll go help Great Father” Yurch-ka notified him from the door “You go ask Lili-ya for help or something”

Maybe he should listen to his young apprentice for once.

With Makka following his steps, he made for the outskirts of the village since it was faster for him to make a roundabout than walking amongst the rest of the houses given that he lived at the very border. He didn’t have to walk that much since Lili-ya was picking large stems at the riverside.

“Blessings of plenty” he greeted the Healer

“Blessings of plenty” she answered back. Makka had been less ceremonious and simply threw itself and gave the woman a lick on her painted cheek she answered with an almost imperceptible smile before turning her gaze to Vitka again “You look sick, child”

“I’m not but I feel like I am” a sad smile glided on his lips while he responded.

She simply nodded in understanding. There was little need for other words than those when it came to Lili-ya since she had already cured him of something fairly similar when the Night claimed his parents and he passed to be under Lili-ya’s care.

“Tell me why while you help me with those” she pointed at a pair of large baskets filled with herbs she would surely use in one of her concoctions for medicine or paint “Hunt has been good, our travel back from the Sun Lands was good, the Great Mother Earth blessed us with good seeds to grow, we have caught large fish at the river even”

“That’s true” he agreed, making a little effort to place the baskets correctly on his arms so they wouldn’t fall “I don’t feel like that because of any of it, I just feel like there is something getting my attention”

The pair entered the village where life had started for the new day. Some of Vitka’s youngest pupils were either helping their mothers drying meat or holding the weavings, men carried water from the river back to their homes while the younger women teamed up to carry some vegetables from the village’s crops. They all bowed their head and mumbled greetings at the Healer while the younger men and women would fix their gaze and blushed when Vitka greeted them.

“Hmm, I have only heard something like that about forty-eight Winters ago” Lili-ya let out a little laugh before shrugging and getting her stoic expression back “But its probably an early conclusion of mine. While I figure it out, come help me with your little marsh man”

Oh, right.

“Has he gotten any better?” he asked trying to sound a little more uninterested than he actually was.

Two nights ago, he had arrived to Lili-ya’s house with his little marsh man burning in fever and basically unconscious in his arms. The Healer made him lie the man on her own sleeping pelts while she tackled the Hunter with questions the poor Vitka had wondered himself before coming into her house.

“Well, he doesn’t have fever anymore but he’s still sleeping” Lili-ya let the handfuls of stems she carried under her arms on the ground while untying the knot securing her house’s door “I tried to make him eat something, but I only managed to make him swallow some water”

Vitka nodded and followed the Healer into her home.

 

* * *

 

 

Cold toes were the first coherent thought on his mind and feeling in his body.

Yuuri would usually lift his legs up once in bed so the covers would land underneath his feet and keep him in a warm cocoon through the entire night without needing to wear socks which he would eventually strip off when he moved on the bed. He must have forgotten to build his cocoon the night prior then.

What time was it? He couldn’t make out sunshine rays hitting his face as it would usually happen when he was late for class, but sometimes Phichit would close the blinds along with the windows in an attempt to keep some warmth inside the bedroom so he better not trust the poor light.

But, wait. It was Saturday, right?

Oh, then it didn’t matter if he left his bed until nine or eleven in the morning: he only had a class at one o’clock and then he would call his parents and sister at four in the afternoon before they went to sleep.

His father would give him the latest update on the soccer league and which players would be selected for the World Cup, his sister would mumble some ‘hello’ and ‘how’s school’ with more of a smirk than a smile and his mother would ask if he had already decided if he would or not visit them on the spring break…

The thought hadn’t left his head when a huge mental tsunami arose from the bottom of his mind and flooded it with fast-forwarded talks in a café close to the labs, Yuuko pointing at a silly mistake, Professor Cialdini giving him another chance on his final project, Takeshi coming in and out of the lab with his arms full of coffee and cookies, a beautiful equation written on the black boards, Phichit recording him for an Instagram live, his instincts telling him something was wrong and then…darkness, crickets and strands of something silvery and shiny above his head.

‘Something is wrong’, his mind claimed anew.

Yuuri forced his eyelids to flash open only to find his entire body was exhausted and even that simple action left him breathless. But his panic wasn’t letting him give up at the first try.

His second attempt made the back of his eyes hurt a little as they adapted themselves to the awfully dark place he was in. When they finally did, they revealed a large circular room, harshly built and with no source of light, which gave the whatever-they-were objects and ceiling hangings around him a very creepy look.

‘Where the hell am I…’

If the memories his brain had shown him were real, then he had had an accident with his machine, so the obvious following scenario would have been for him to be sent into a hospital. In that case, hospitals weren’t the bright-lighted, white and impeccable large rooms pictured on the TV. They had even left him with his clothes, shoes and even his glasses instead of the expected gown and bare feet under a sheet. His nose bridge was painful since he had slept with them on.

Voices. He commanded his body to turn in their direction, to the only and weak source of light.

He was seriously considering talking with the place’s director: which kind of hospital used a straw-door in a patient’s room… or which kind of doctors looked like pelt-coated fashion disasters.

“Uh… excuse me?” he mumbled with all the voice volume he was able of getting out of his throat, it sounded croaky like if he had just recovered from a really bad sore throat.

One of the figures turned its steps towards the place where Yuuri was lying down while the other one basically jumped back in a shock barely readable under the weak lighting. Yet, the eyes of the woman approaching him were fully visible to him: a bright green-hazel color which shone with the spark proper of someone who kept great wisdom.

Her eyes were the only feature in her Yuuri could feel familiar. Because the rest wasn’t at all.

She had red and brown stripes drawn on her face where her wrinkles traced really thin pathways which seemed somehow elegant, her ears were pierced and had beaded earrings hanging all the way down to where her collarbone must have been hidden underneath all those pelts. Her hair was braided tightly at the back of her head, decorated with more beads and feathers. At the sight of her, the words ‘wild beauty’ were the ones to appear in Yuuri’s mind.

The woman inspected him moving her head sideways a few times until she finally placed her hand on his forehead and mumbled something underneath her breath in a language that to Yuuri’s ears was both so similar to the Russian he had gotten used to hearing at College yet seemed like a completely foreign language.

A lot of ‘sh’ and ‘zh’ with a mix of more guttural and less polished sounds he just couldn’t describe.

Yuuri’s brain seemed to only pay attention to the language as it wouldn’t obey any other direction from him. He tried to make his body move, his voice to protest, his head to shake away from the woman’s touch but he was frozen in fear. Fear for the unknown.

“ _Uvet Vitka”_ the woman said in a stronger voice, her hand still resting on Yuuri’s forehead.

His chest had started to rise and fall rapidly in a just arising panic extending through his body. Who was that woman? Why was she dressed like that? Which language was she speaking? Where was he? Why was he there?

All questions were interrupted when the second figure approached him.

Yuuri had seen a few model-like people walking around the streets of Saint Petersburg: tall girls and boys with eyes as big as marbles in every shade between the green and blue covered by thick rosy eyelids, their hair in a variety of warm blonde colors with an occasional tint of auburn, tall cheekbones and hollowed cheeks covered by a pale skin, thin limbs and bodies which could compete with those of a Barbie and Ken dolls. Yet all of them could fell to shame compared to the person who stood behind Mrs. Wild Beauty.

Guiding himself by the facial features and the broadness of his shoulders, he was a man. His bones were sharp on his jaw and on the apples of his cheeks, but his skin was plump in his lips and eyelids. Despite his young face, his hair was a curious shade of silver, a part of it let loose while the rest was intricately braided and decorated in the same way as the woman’s. Despite his lean physique, muscle was visible underneath his clothes.

But what drew Yuuri’s attention the most were his eyes. Blue, but a brighter shade than any other kind yet it also was deep as if one stared at the sea. It was weird, a pretty weird.

“ _Nie tep?”_ he heard him ask to the woman, kneeling next to Yuuri and piercing him with his eyes.

While his body had remained quiet when the woman had touched him, as soon as the man extended his hand to touch him, his body suddenly woke up in red alert. He managed to sit down and crawl away from the contact until his back clashed against the wrinkled wall.

The action left him breathless and the two people before him mumbling unknown words to him as if he was a wounded animal.

“Don’t get close!” he croaked “I’ll call the police!”

Mrs. Wild Beauty commanded something at the man, but he seemed kind of scared to fulfill the order.

“Where am I?” Yuuri demanded with a weaker tone, his legs getting wobbly “Who are you?”

The man approached him slowly, crouching a little bit to be at the same height as him while extending his hands at him in a gesture to calm him down which only scared Yuuri a little more. A pair of strong hands grabbed his shoulders lightly, he tried to shake the grip off and screamed uselessly while the man mumbled quiet words in that guttural language of his.

“Stop! Don’t touch me!” he yelled as loud as he could.

His vision started to diffuse and not just because his glasses had fallen off his face. His body limped and his legs folded down to the ground had it not been for the other man who held him before he broke his nose. The voice of the woman commanded something from the other side of the place.

Yuuri still weakly tried to push the man away from him but his strength soon left him blacked out again.

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuuri can't believe the conclusion his brain has given him on where and, most importantly, when he is standing right now.

Phichit’s phone buzzed in warning that it only had twenty percent of battery left but, in a unprecedented move in his life, he swept the notification away from his screen and the video on it kept playing.

It was the file of his Instagram live playing in a row. In it, Yuuri smiled at the camera before turning to his machine with a tense back, his hand moved on the machine and then, poof. A flash of light, Yuuri was gone while him, Celestino, Yuuko and Takeshi were thrown aback by an invisible shockwave which ended up by blacking his screen. End of the video.

His finger pressed the replay button.

Next to him, Yuuko moved in her sleep, making him turn a little so he wouldn’t wake her up. Nishigori was sleeping next to the door, so there was no problem with his cellphone’s light flashing him awake.

It had been six hours since one of the officials and a translator had taken Celestino to God knew where for what should be his tenth interrogation already, though Phichit didn’t understand what they expect them him to say that he hadn’t already. Dumb cops.

Actually, the four of them had said basically the same every single time they had been pulled out of the room on how Yuuri didn’t turn on the security system, the isolation wasn’t activated so the effects of his time-space twist extended to the closest living matter, him, and that was all. They had also tried to explain the officials there existed two different scenarios from there: if his organic matter and atomic composition had been too heavy then it had been incompatible with the energy flows in the twist (meaning he was probably dead, so despite his scientific mind, Phichit preferred the second one) or his atoms had been compatible with the energy and had tagged along with it to wherever they were flowing to.

From the beginning to the end of their explanations, the officials had let their jaws drop and their eyes open wide in a clear expression of ‘what the fuck are you saying?’. It hadn’t been any better when Celestino basically translated them the physics into something their brains could get.

“A leap in time” he mumbled with a voice full of both concern and excitement.

The officials burst into laughing.

Phichit sighed. His best friend was either dead or he was trapped in some kind of sci-fi time traveling phenomenon while the useless police had confiscated his machine and wouldn’t stop asking the exact same stupid questions.

The sound of the door opening followed by a pair of gargantuan voices made him turn around and woke his friends up. Celestino entered the room with a more defeated demeanor than the one he had exited with, which was a lot to say.

“Hey kiddos” the professor greeted after the officers had slammed the door closed “Sorry for waking you up”

His three students got him a chair and Celestino dropped himself over it, sighing tiredly.

“The same?” Phichit asked him. The professor nodded.

“Still, I managed to ask them to call Yuuko’s family so they wouldn’t worry” he reassured his pupil, who nodded in thankfulness while caressing her belly

The only attentions the officers had given them, were for Yuuko: warm tea, a salad, cookies for her sweet exploits, if she needed a doctor, a pillow, a blanket, moving a sofa into the room so she would be comfortable. At least they had decency in that part. They offered the professor some of the food Yuuko had shared with them.

“If I understood correctly,” Celestino mumbled while he munched on a chicken sandwich “they have enclosed the lab for security, but they don’t want to touch Yuuri’s machine before they know _exactly_ what it does. They sent people to Hasetsu and I bet they won’t be smooth on telling his family what happened”

The already down mood in the room went down to the negatives with Celestino’s words.

“But,” the professor appointed anew, gulping down his sandwich “I do have some kind of good news: they will let us out tomorrow but only to drive us to the lab to help them”

“So, you mean we’ll have access to the machine?” Phichit felt his own eyes open wide. Unable to answer verbally with a sandwich mouthful, the professor nodded.

For a moment, the boy could see a lamp turning on inside his head. He grabbed the professor’s chair and spun it until they were facing each other.

“Then, does that mean we can revert it?” Phichit asked in excitement

“How?” Yuuko’s voice interrupted his excitement “We can’t just push the lever back and make the entire process to turn back. You worked with him: if we put the equation in the system, the process will simply repeat. Not turn back”

Phichit then turned to his friend.

“But Yuuri did make a counter-equation” he exclaimed without losing the smile “The first process he extended the final equation from! He took it out of a book and then re design it to fit the algorithm! I helped him with it during a summer!”

Yuuko looked at him like she would do with a small child who doesn’t understand.

“Yes, but that’s in his notebook.” she grabbed his agonizing phone and replayed the video which had been left open “And he had it with him”

It was true. Phichit followed his friend’s pink nail pointing at his friend’s back, a very-well loved leather pocket notebook with a pencil coming out of its pages the same way the very notebook did from Yuuri’s jean pocket. Every single step and definition of the equation, algorithm and machine was written in there.

“It’s impossible to do it without that notebook” Yuuko finished

“Do we have the final equation on the board?”

Celestino’s face had that asymmetrical frown he only got when he was thinking on something big or when one of his student’s had an interesting project. Phichit and Yuuko nodded.

“On the board and probably in the machine too” the boy confirmed.

“We can turn it around” the professor mumbled so quickly and low-voiced his words almost were unnoticed by his students before jumping out of his chair, surprising them with the suddenly of his action “We only have to do the exact process backwards!”

Both Phichit’s and Yuuko’s eyes were wide open and shiny with understanding. It was going to be hard; it would take time and difficult having the police stomping on their heels. But it was scientifically and faithfully _possible_.

“We can do it kiddos!” the professor claimed cheerfully

 

* * *

 

Yuuri’s stomach grumbled in hunger for the third time.

Lilia (she still corrected him on mispronouncing her name, but his tongue just couldn’t grasp it) darted her penetrating green eyes down to a small bowl next to his ‘bed’ with a sort of soup in it, which had already been re-heated three times. Yuuri made his best to avert her green gaze.

“ _Ye nie porvisha_ ” he heard her mumble with a clear tint of a pissed off mother. Lilia pushed the bowl at him again “ _Svoi, zha_ ”

He didn’t understand a thing, but he could guess what she was telling him off about. If he wanted to know where the hell he was and how to get out of there, he needed energy. The soup was way waterier than what he was used to, reddish with a piece of meat and what seemed to be a poorly cut mushroom chunk floating in it. He drank.

“ _Bilo’i tak slozh?_ ” Lilia mumbled with clear sarcasm, with the voice of someone who knows she is right.

The soup wasn’t bad, if only it lacked a bit of salt and while his tongue wasn’t extraordinarily pleased, his belly was joyous with its warmth and the feel of having _food_ in it. Despite the seemingly eternally-lit fire at the center of the room, he could still feel cold in his toes underneath the pelts.

Lilia stood up to remove a green concoction in her clay cooking pot, making her multiple jewels shake and ring like small bells.

In the time he had been awake, several people had come in the circular room and while some of the visitors had some kind of jewelry hanging on their bodies or paint on their faces and arms, none was as elaborate as Lilia’s. The beads of her necklaces were colorful, with shells, shiny rocks and feathers and the red on her features formed some pretty intricate braids and patterns.

Well, there kinda was.

Maybe his ornaments weren’t as abundant or complex as the woman’s, but the silver haired man who had been in there when he first woke up had a ton of beads on his braids and a thick necklace made with what seemed to be bones and teeth; something he hadn’t seen anyone else wear.

He finished the soup, his tongue fighting hard not to pop away the piece of too-cooked meat off his mouth, yet he couldn’t help but leave the mushroom chunk laying at the bottom of the bowl. Those things had been his culinary nightmare ever since he was a child.

“ _Ye sdel?_ ” the woman asked, refilling his bowl with the green thing she had been cooking much to Yuuri’s dismay. Lilia made some gestures with her spoon, indicating him to eat it quickly.

The thick consistency and too-herbal taste of the concoction almost made the mushroom go down his throat unnoticed. Almost.

“Ugh” Yuuri mumbled, feeling the trace of bitterness on his tongue.

“ _Za´tra,_ ” Lilia’s voice made him look up at her “ _ye dolosh tach khor sho lya stir ki. Taksne, noi shkur, vash taij._ ”

She had spoken too fast but, judging by how her spoon had encircled his chest several times, he figured she was talking something about his clothes. They had gotten damp in sweat from the second time he passed out, so Lilia and her partner had stripped him off his jacket, shirt and sweater to leave him in his plain white under-shirt.

“ _Stir. Ki._ ” Lilia said slowly, placing her hands over her head and mimicking something similar to her scratching her head. Yuuri’s puzzled expression must have been pretty evident since she also had to voice what seemed to be the sound of water falling.

“ _Stir ki_ ” she repeated, ending her demonstration

“Take a bath?” Yuuri guessed, making some mimic of his own. Lilia’s green eyes had a ‘you finally understood something’ shine.

As much as a bath sounded delightful, Yuuri had very low expectations to it considering the past days he had being eating and … doing other necessities in clay pots. Thinking of warm water was probably a very picky desire.

However, the bath finally offered him the chance to get a glimpse of his surroundings and give himself an idea of where the hell he was.

“ _Blagsleiv izobiye, Vitka_ ” the woman’s voice brought Yuuri back to earth as a little bit of what seemed dusk light came into the circular room along a familiar figure.

“ _Blagsleiv izobiye_ ” the silver haired man answered. Everyone who came in there would say the same words, which brought Yuuri to think it was some kind of greeting. The man turned at him with a smile “ _Blagsleiv izobiye_ ”

Oh, he should say something.

“Konnichiwa” you’re an idiot Katsuki Yuuri, he scolded himself “Uh, I mean… _Bagslev izobi_?”

Despite his auto-correction, the man seemed to have some interest in his mistake. Kneeling beside his ‘bed’ and crouching his neck, he still was taller than Yuuri.

“ _Kui ni shi ua_?”

Something inside Yuuri lit up as soon as those syllables left the man’s lips. While he had spent quite the time with Lilia inside the circular room, she had conformed with simply knowing he had understood whatever she was trying to say. But now, there finally was someone _trying_ to understand him!

“Konnichiwa” he repeated, pointing at the invisible air coming out from his lips “ _Bagslev izobi_ ” his finger pointed at the hypothetical air out of the other man’s mouth “Konnichiwa. _Bagslev izobi._ Konnichiwa. _Bagslev izobi._ ”

The same spark he had seen in Lilia’s green gaze when both understood each other’s ‘bath’ translation shone in the man’s eyes.

“Kunshiwa” the man greeted with bright eyes

“ _Bagslev izobi_ ” Yuuri answered back with a smile

The man smiled wider and got closer on his knees, he put his palm on his chest.

“ _Vitka_ ” he patted himself lightly “ _Vitka. Vitka. Vitka._ ”

_Vitka_ then fixed an evidently excited gaze on him. Yuuri repeated the gesture and placed his hand on his chest.

“Yuuri” he mumbled quietly “Yuu-ri. Yuuri. Yuu-ri.”

Vitka tilted his head a little, making his silver braids fall to a side with a small ringing sound, analyzing what had just come out of Yuuri’s mouth.

“ _Iu-uri_ ”

Yuuri chuckled.

“Close enough”

 

* * *

 

Yuuri was a physicist. A man of science. He had devoted his life and his brain to try to understand the mysteries of the laws which ruled the universe, the beginning and evolving of space and time in the reality. To him, nothing in this life could ever get apart from the rules of Physics…which was why he just couldn’t wrap his mind on what he had just found.

Judging by the light which came in the circular room when Vitka arrived, it was already midday. Lilia had given him some sort of tea and a strip of dried salty meat as breakfast as soon as he woke up-but he was already wishing for fruit or something for his roaring stomach to snack on by the time Vitka arrived.

The silver haired man helped him to stand up, quite the task given how he had been lying down for more than three days and only getting up when he needed to arrive to the closest clay pot. His legs wobbled while he looked for support on Vitka’s shoulders as the man held him by the waist tightly before essaying some walking towards the exit.

“ _O’torsh ye_ ” Vitka probably meant something along the lines of ‘be careful’

Light outside the circular room almost made Yuuri went blind, maybe he should have gotten himself those glasses which turned dark when the sun hit them last time he visited his oculist. When his eyes finally adapted themselves to have the Sun present again, he felt his heart, soul and mind tightened into a large knot.

Before his eyes, it seemed as if a museum’s Prehistoric exhibitions had suddenly come up to life: primal houses made of what seemed to be dry mud and sticks stood in a circle around Lilia’s, long meat strips drying like ragged clothes on stick bases, people carving large (mammoth?!) fangs or molding new clay pots, pelts and furs being stretched for curation and, the most evident and shocking thing for Yuuri, the naturality in which they lived what seemed to be their daily lives. They weren’t putting up a show.

Yuuri’s head turned in every direction possible for his neck, worrying Vitka in the process.

“ _O torsh, ye slab_ ” the silver-haired man mumbled with concern, adjusting his grip on Yuuri’s body before they followed Lilia’s steps again

More of the alive-museum people were at the river, knitting and repairing fishing nets by hand, their light-colored eyes opened wide in curiosity at the sight of Yuuri.

Wait…. the river shore…he knew it.

Celestino had taken him and the rest of his class on a trip after they won an academic decathlon against the Physics Faculty of the Moscow University. For Phichit and him was a wonderful, and cold, change of scenery outside of the city when the professor organized a hiking on the green surroundings of Saint Petersburg.

Phichit and him had taken a picture in that exact shore while their crazy Russian classmates swam and splashed in the freezing-cold river. The photo was in Phichit’s Instagram feed for God’s sake!

“ _Omye ne rez jie go_ ” Lilia’s voice brought him back to earth

“ _Da_ ” after that short syllable, Vitka slid a hand under his shirt and started to strip him

Yuuri let out a startled scream and pushed the other man away, only achieving to fall down on the river as he couldn’t move Vitka an inch. The young physicist could have freaked out even more when he felt the foreign touch had he not been warned by Lilia that the purpose of getting out of the circular room was for him to have a bath.

“I… I can do it myself!” he assured, putting his hands before him in a gesture to stop Vitka from getting closer to him.

He wasn’t very sure if his fever had came back due to his sudden change of location from lying underneath thick pelts close to a fire to basically being naked out in the open and close to what surely was a freezing-cold river… or if he simply was embarrassed for getting stripped before Lilia, Vitka and a bunch of hopefully-focused-on-fishing people a few meters away from them.

“ _O zhe_ ” the other man pointed at the briefs still covering his private parts, and Yuuri didn’t even need to take a minute to interpret the words: those too.

“No” he firmly answered, covering the garment with his hands.

“ _Stir ki zheye_ ” Vitka didn’t seem to understand the indirect gesture and advanced towards him anyway, pulling his briefs down and making Yuuri let out a shriek “ _ye dolch to znya_ ”

The following hour or so was an absolute torture for him, not only for the merciless scratching Lilia made all over his body with Vitka helping her by pouring God-only-knew what on his skin while being constantly hit by a stream of icy water, but because his mind was trying to process and accept what was happening to him.

Numbers inside his head were moving fast, following the speed of his own nerves. He had left his trusty little notebook back inside the circular room but there was no need for it since the formulas and equations written in the board were still clear in his head. And what he concluded was terrifying.

As the safety system hadn’t been activated, the reaction hadn’t only reached the elements enclosed in the containers but his skin still having contact with the machine.

Given that, unlike the contained elements, he was the only organic matter close by the machine, it hadn’t picked part of his own matter to use as a catalyzer and, unable to know what to do with him, it simply extended its reaction towards Yuuri.

He had basically traveled back in time through his machine.

Yuuri thanked when Vitka poured water over his head so neither him nor Lilia would notice his tears.

 

* * *

 

Vitka was worried for Iu-uri.

Ever since that time when his little marsh man had woken up so violently, Lili-ya had assured him all Iu-uri needed was some more rest and she could manage on her own. While he had had some practice with Yurch-ka, it was hard to keep his nose out of his marsh man’s state. Especially when there were so many words about it floating all around the village coming from all the Petsk who had entered to Lili-ya’s house.

‘I saw his hair is the color of the Bright Mother’s home!’

‘He carries a strange amulet at the very front of his face…’

‘Where did he get such weird-colored pelts?’

‘I heard him scream a lot…Could it be he comes from a violent tribe?”

‘He has even more curves than I do! Are you sure he is a man?”

As much as he would have liked to go into Lili-ya’s house to ease his curiosity, the healer had begged the Petsk not to visit her if it wasn’t completely necessary… but fortunately for him, food was something completely necessary for Lili-ya since her Cared was on a trip to visit the Alma tribe.

His little marsh man…no, _Iu-uri_ was already awake and eating some of Lili-ya’s healing soups. The healer had stripped his off his strange pelts and was now only wearing a cloth thin like a petal, unlike anything the Petsk could weave. Vitka had greeted him, not really expecting him to answer, but Iu-uri surprised him by greeting him back in his own tongue.

Then he told him his name. It was a strange name, no doubt, but something about it was sweet as the sound danced on Vitka’s lips.

Lili-ya had then asked him to help her making Iu-uri have a bath with the hope that some of her remedies on his skin could ease the young man. Vitka agreed to almost immediately. But then, instead of the bath doing Iu-uri any visible good, he just seemed to be tired and distant. Vitka was even afraid the man had gotten sicker since his eyes were red.

“He’s not eating” Vitka appointed the Healer as he ate a strip of meat and a handful of seeds. Iu-uri had the same menu placed before him but he hadn’t touched anything.

The Healer gave a look to the boy sitting quietly on his sleeping pelts but the pots, herb sacks and boxes heavily overflowing her hands soon demanded her attention back “Maybe he’s tired from the time outside. Remember he was five days asleep”

Vitka had only formally educated into hunting and being responsible for his fellow Petsk but, living with Lili-ya, he had sneakily learnt a thing or two about of the art of Healing. And he was pretty certain someone healthy wasn’t supposed to look like Iu-uri was looking.

The beautiful deep eyes which had struck him upon their first encounter now looked empty, his gaze was fixed on a random point on the wall and he could see his hand shaking.

He went to sit down beside him again and longed his hand to touch Iu-uri’s shaking one, the other man didn’t seem to notice his presence until Vitka’s fingers brushed his skin.

And Iu-uri violently pulled away from the contact, horror visible in his eyes.

“ _No!_ ” he shrieked like he had done when they were at the river. When their eyes met, his expression softened with evident guilt, but the fright in his eyes remained “ _Sorry… I should sleep a bit_ ”

Iu-uri then put the meat and seeds away from him, got underneath the pelts and turned his face to the other side in a very clear sign of him wanting to sleep.

“Vitka,” Lili-ya called him, pointing the uneaten meat “why don’t you go back home and give those to Makka? I’ll send someone for you if I need more help with him”

The hunter nodded, put on his warm pelts before walking outside but he didn’t leave without taking a last look at Iu-uri. Oh, he knew what those soft shoulder moves meant: he was crying.

The village was probably the busiest at that moment, when the Bright Father was about to hide and clear the way for his Cared. The other hunters and the fishers would come with small catches for their families, the children would collect firewood for their homes and while other Petsk were picking up the meat and pelts they had been curating all day long.

Unlike his fellow Petsk’s houses, his was still unlit and quiet.

Hanging from a small thread at the entrance, was a wooden whistle which he made sound before entering. Makka, who would probably be somewhere near bothering rabbits and similar, wouldn’t take too long to come back home.

In the meantime, he took off his warm pelts, unbraided his hair and piled some firewood up in his oven. His too-fluffy wolf came through the door happily running with a prey between its fangs.

“Wow!” Vitka smiled and scratched her behind the ears “Did you catch it on your own? What a good girl! Look, Lili-ya sent you a gift!”

He had found Makka when he was fourteen Winters old, precisely during a Winter while he and the Petsk were walking to the Sun Lands. He was deeply asleep inside the moving-house he shared with his Mother and Father when he heard quiet whines next to one of the food bags. Thinking it probably was one of the younger children who had been left hungry, he woke up only to find a small cub unsuccessfully trying to open a food bag.

It was probably the size of his fore arm, too fluffy to see what it actually was until Vitka picked it through the loose skin on its nape. Ah, a wolf cub.

The Petsk had their own breed of tamed and domesticated wolves, the _K’ski_ , but the shape of their heads, the color of their fur and their eyes was quite different from the wolves of the woods. This cub had almost fooled him given how _brown_ its fur was and how dark its eyes were.

“Vitka, go and leave it outside” his Father’s voice spoke softly to not awake Vitka’s mother sleeping beside him “Its mother must be looking for it”

Any other day, he would have obeyed his father without second thought, but while he held the cub’s nape, its bones were visible beneath the fur which wasn’t too thick for the matter.

“I think it’s alone, Father” he mumbled holding the animal a little gentler before passing it to his father “Look”

The older man held the whining cub between calloused fingers, turned a little bit to help his eyes inspect it better under the weak light the agonizing fire at the middle of their house offered him. His son was right: the poor cub probably wasn’t a Moon old and it evidently hadn’t eaten in several days, one didn’t have to make too much effort to notice the popping bones.

The man passed the young animal back to his son with an almost unnoticeable nod.

“Give it a strip of meat and then go back to sleep. You can place it under the pelts, so she doesn’t eat more” his father let out a loud yawn and went back under its sleeping pelts.

The kid smiled widely and cuddled with the little fluff ball after feeding it two meat strips. It was alright, he could eat one less the following morning. Vitka started mumbling soft gentle words to the cub who was probably still scared.

_M’ka_. Calm down. _M’ka_. Calm down. _M’ka_. Calm down.

“How about I call you Makka?” Vitka mumbled, almost half-asleep. The cub answered with an equally sleepy lick to his chin.

Makka had grown a lot ever since. Ya Kov and Lili-ya allowed him to keep the little wolf after his parents passed away and as Winters passed, both became inseparable.

“Well girl,” Vitka took his boots off, placing them near the warmth of the hearth “why don’t we go to sleep?”

Vitka’s sleeping pelt was a large bear fur he had hunt while the Petsk did their long walk towards the Sun Lands and the animal attacked their camp, probably because they had settled along a river full of fish. Any other time, they would have simply scared it away from the houses, but the beast had attacked one of the families and a hunt couldn’t be helped.

A good thing about the size though, was Vitka and Makka fit perfectly under it and there was still more space.

“Good night Makka” Vitka mumbled. His fluffy wolf licked his chin, making him smile.

His night would have been calm as usual, with the occasional little Makka-kicks as she chased little preys in her sleep. At one point he could even hear the Wind chanting outside of his home, probably bringing in the last traces of snow with it but he was quick to fall sleep again, only thinking about how upset his fellow Petsk would be to find some of their crops cold-blue.

Nothing out of order had it not been for Lili-ya waking up in the middle of the night.

“Vitka! Vitka!” a pair of long-fingered hands was shaking his body “Wake up child!”

His eyes were heavy when he tried to open them, his limbs numb and unwilling to cooperate but Lili-ya didn’t give him much time. Urge in her voice and eyes.

“Vitka wake up!” she prompted again

“What is it?” the hunter asked with a sleepy voice “An animal entered a house?”

Lili-ya looked at him the way she would do with a child.

“Iu-uri ran away”

 


	4. Chapter 4

Yuuri just couldn’t conceal the sleep.

In any other situation, he would have blamed his empty stomach and thus his signature way of throwing tantrums by not eating. But at the moment, he liked to believe he had way a better excuse for Morpheus to run away from him.

He was stuck in the Prehistory.

One of Phichit’s many acquaintances around campus was Guang Hong, a Chinese freshman who was on exchange from Beijing studying Archaeology. They had met for a coffee a few times during the previous semester and, while he was even shier than he was, whenever he started to talk about his career his passion absolutely took over and there was no way of shutting him. Thanks to all that excessive information and his own ability to memorize stuff plus what little view he had had of his surroundings so far, the Neolithic was the first period to pop up in his mind.

And that certainty, instead of bringing him some comfort, terrorized him.

For once in his life, his brain pleaded and begged to be wrong, to have misunderstood his calculations, chemical processes and studies. Could there be a misplaced sign again? _No_. Maybe his machine had malfunctioned again and instead of a time-space loop it had only been a space one? _No_. A mere and sole misplacing in space? _No_. Could it be this was only a village lost in the infinite Siberia? _No_. Was there some logical, rational and preferably do-able way to go back home?

_No._

That mere and simple syllable his brain repeated again and again in the back of his mind was striping him off all the little composure he had miraculously achieved to retain.

His head was about to explode from the inside, he was sure.

Inside the circular room…no, house everything was dark and silent save for the softly agonizing hearth crackling in the very center and the deaf sounds coming from the outside, probably the bone and bead hangings on the ceiling being violently rocked by the wind. Lilia’s silhouette was evident on the other side of the room, rising and falling with every breath.

An intense migraine drilled sharply send an attack to him. He hushed a painful shriek in the bottom of his throat, but he was unable to hold his tears back.

His family. Would that mean he would never see his Oka-san and Otou-san again? Would Mari never call him ‘lil-bro’ ever again? Yu-Topia… would he ever feel the soothing warmth of the hot springs on his skin? How he regretted complaining of the humid summers at home when at that moment he would give everything he owned for a second of it.

His friends. Would they be ok? Yuuko was pregnant and he wouldn’t be able to live with himself knowing he and his stupid machine had been the cause of a miscarriage. Yuuri was sure he was Professor Cialdini’s number one headache in that moment; he hated to be such a burden to such a wonderful professor. At least they would be safe, his own body must have acted as a barrier between the machine’s effect and his friends.

_Are you sure about that?_

Oh no…

What if his body hadn’t been enough protection? After all, he had tested the machine while it had the safety on, never with its full-range capacity. What if his own organic matter had been a bridge for the reaction to move to other organic matter? What if his friends were stuck in the same situation as he was? Scared and confused about their environment. The image of his pregnant friend came back to his mind.

If it was true they had jumped in time with him, then she was the most prone to danger. Maybe he could find them, bring them to the village: it was the best place to be while they were there. Perhaps they would find a solution together and go back home.

Yes. That was a good idea.

He needed to go look for them. Together they would go back home. Yes. His shoes and sweater were nearby, he better got going. It was dark outside, but he was sure it wasn’t that late: Lilia had gone to sleep when the sun was hiding. Yes.

Outside of the curved walls, Yuuri could hear a sound he had became familiar with living in Saint Petersburg: the sound of wind carrying snow.

That was his signal to go.

 

* * *

 

 

Phichit, Yuuko, Takeshi and Celestino were falling asleep against one and other in the backseat they were sitting on.

Neither had properly slept since the police had took them into the station and they had their internal sleeping clock completely messed up thanks to the continuous and long interrogations they were submitted to every night and day. The officers had only gone smooth with Yuuko: her interrogation sessions were quick and only once per day. She had also been the only one to go out of the station to be taken for a medical check-up.

The group woke up at the same time when the patrol suddenly stopped with violence, the driver cursed under his breath. They couldn’t see him, there was a fancy automatic dark and completely polarized glass, as were the back windows, blocking any chance of getting a glance of the outside world.

“Are we there yet?” the professor asked amongst yawns, referring to the University.

“ _Da_ , but we can’t advance” the officer replied

The four of them looked at each other with confusion. It was true the traffic in campus could be a little crazy from time to time but none of them had ever heard of a time it was so bad actual _police_ cars with their sirens going out loud couldn’t pass through.

It seemed their driver read their thoughts because he allowed the in-between glass to come down.

Professor and students squeezed their heads in the small space left by the dark glass and got the same visual range their driver had. And what they saw, was absolute madness.

The grey concrete covering every single parking alley and short avenues leading to the Faculty’s entrance was virtually invisible underneath so many shoes. There were cameramen, TV vans, people dressed in suits and armed with microphones, a multitude of cellphones being held up high above the heads of the crowd with arms wearing the distinctive ‘пресс’ armband identifying them as part of the press. All of it was trying, very uselessly, to be held back by a large team of police officers making a way for the patrol convoy into the faculty entrance.

 In the back seat, students and professor thought their jaws were going to crash on the car’s ground.

“What is this?” Phichit gave an out loud voice to everyone’s thoughts.

Their driver, whom they now recognized as the officer who would go into their room to leave treats for Yuuko under the protective and jealous gaze of her fiancé, turned his head at the dark-skinned boy.

“They’re here for your video” he mumbled with an evidently fed-up voice tone.

That hushed Phichit and his accompaniments’ further questions.

It took them more than five minutes to get to the entrance, following the lead of the other patrol driving before them and the officers creating a living barrier against the journalists. If the sight was already unsettling, the moment the group stepped out of the car, the sound became an absolute nightmare to their ears.

All the journalists started to speak at the top of their lung at the same time, sometimes in other languages than Russian, until they reached a point in which they all merged into a single collective sound.

Another group of officers guided them as if they were kindergarteners into the building while the crowd started to dangerously approach them in desperation despite the living barrier. The door closed behind them with a loud thump followed by smaller but continuous knocks from the journalists. More officers were waiting in the inside, along what seemed to be doctors dressed in white lab coats or containment suits.

A set of containment suits were waiting for them, save for Yuuko who had to put on one of the lab coats and was indicated to follow a second team to observe rather than going inside to the room where the machine was.

The rest of the group nodded at her when she walked away and glanced at each other.

While they knew they were being under severe scrutiny, _helping_ whoever-those-people-were wasn’t their main goal. But now they had seen the extent Yuuri’s experiment had reached, they knew they needed those people if they wanted to have any chance of success.

“You three are going in with doctor Zakharov and his team” another officer called their attention while they were being zipped into the suits “We expect your total and absolute cooperation with the case”

Phichit felt his brows knit into a tight confused frown.

“Case? What case?” the boy demanded

The officer stared at him the way one would do with someone stupid “Didn’t you see all that people outside kid? That _thing_ ” he pointed at the direction of the machine’s room “is the most important scientific discovery in history, and it’s not in America’s hands. If we can get it running again, the benefits would be infinite”

Without any other word, the officer walked away, shouting orders in Russian.

“Well, fuck” Phichit mumbled. Now they had another problem on their shoulders.                        

 

* * *

 

 

Vitka had a moment to think on how strange _Iu-uri’s_ pelts were when he gave them to Makka to smell for tracking.

They were too soft, as if someone had treated for several suns in a row. It had the same color of the Great Father Sky, as if Iu-uri had managed to catch a Manak in the domains of the Bright Father. He had heard some of his fellow Petsk say that, with the color of his eyes, hair and skin, Iu-uri might as well be a son of the Bright Mother…

“Here, girl” he passed the pelt close to Makka’s nose

The young she-wolf sniffed lightly and immediately set to run, giving Vitka almost no time to pass the garment to Lili-ya and the other hunters she had gathered to track Iu-uri.

Amongst the Petsk it wasn’t rare to keep a hunting dog. A breed smaller and leaner than wild wolves, with smaller fangs and a fur smooth as that of an otter; they were good aids and partners during the hunts and protectors during the walk to the Sun Lands. Yet, and there were no Petsk to deny so, Makka outran every hunting dog in every field.

Her nose could detect even the smallest track of a prey, her legs allowed her to walk or even run larger distances for a longer time without getting half as tired as the hunting dogs, her fur was thicker to protect her from the cold so hunts in the snow weren’t a problem. Even the smallest and faintest smell of Iu-uri on those weird pelts meant she could find him in no time.

Snow felt cold and humid against his skin and he bet on Makka’s fur as well.

In a normal situation, he would have locked his house’s door tightly with ropes so the wind wouldn’t blow it away and then placed a leather strip along the borders to avoid the humid snow coming in. After that, he would have wrapped himself along with Makka and set to sleep.

Also, in a normal situation, he would have been worried sick on the perspective of getting his nose and fingers burned blue due to the cold. But in that moment, he was worried that would happen to Iu-uri.

“You got anything Makka?” he asked his faithful wolf, getting a small huff in return as a sign of affirmation

The wind was blowing violently and harshly, whistling in his ears and blinding his eyes, but he could tell Makka was guiding him towards the riverbank. His little marsh man wouldn’t be as crazy as to jump into the river in the middle of a blizzard, would he? Such were his thoughts when Makka turned to a side and barked at the stakes where the Petsk tied their boats.

One of the boats was missing.

“Bright Mother, don’t strip your blessing off him” he mumbled under his breath and protector

 

* * *

 

 

They couldn’t be that far right?

According to his mental math and given his friends hadn’t landed in the exact same spot he had, then that meant the machine had its effects directly proportional to the distance in which they were standing from in the beginning. Even though he wished he had brought his faithful little notebook with him, there was hardly any need for it when he could do all the equations inside his head.

Yuuko was his priority. Given how far she was seated from his machine, then she must have landed way farther than from where he had so maybe he would have to make a little more effort rowing up the river.

But it would be worth it. Yes.

The frost on his knuckles would be worth it. Yes.

His nose was cold and a little numb, but that didn’t matter. Yes.

Oh, that seemed to be a good point to stop the boat. All he needed to do was to push a little bit to get to the opposite side of the riverbank and he could start his search. He could see the forest already.

Maybe Yuuko would have gotten a little lost in the middle of the trees but he could easily track her through her steps on the snow. After all, the snow was thick on the forest ground, freshly fallen. Wonderful!

He would find Yuuko in no time. Yes.

 

* * *

 

 

“Thank the Bright Mother!” Vitka claimed, the sound of his voice muffled by the thick protecting pelt covering his face up to his eyes.

Makka barked in agreement as the missing boat came into their sight. It hadn’t been tied to anything but Vitka didn’t think its rower had any intention of actually securing the boat and they had been the river rocks the ones to hold it in ‘place’. His faithful wolf, always understanding him without the need of words, jumped to the snowy bank with the boat’s rope between her fangs to help Vitka pull the boat to land.

Vitka hadn’t yet finished to tie the boat when his wolf was already on her way to the insides of the forest, letting out alarmed short howls. Despite his cold toes, Vitka grabbed his spear and ran behind her.

Oh, there! He could already see the track Makka was so eagerly following.

And he felt his poor spirit sink way below under the thick layer of snow: those tracks were clearly of a person but Vitka could easily see the front part of the track split into five gradually longer parts, meaning Iu-uri had fled without anything covering his feet.

“Vitka!” a voice called his attention back “Vitka! Any signs of him?”

Mila was a young woman blessed by the Bright Father who had given her a beautiful mane in the color of a warm hearth, only Vitka had more people coming from other tribes in an attempt to get his Care. Understandably, who wouldn’t love to Care for one of the Petsk’s most skilled hunters?

“I think so” Vitka held his spear horizontal to salute his friend’s bow “But I think he ran away without boots”

 Mila’s face contracted into a shocked expression before “Well, your little marsh man is quite the thing…”

Both hunters turned to Makka when the she-wolf howled desperately to get Vitka’s attention. She was already quite far away from them and seemed to be going to a hollow the Petsk hunters loved for its use when it came to hunting deer.

“You better go to her” Mila mumbled, not quite completely out of her shock yet “Yurch Ka must be on his way but he’ll need help with the boat. I’ll catch up to you!”

Without another word, Mila’s figure disappeared in the middle of the snowy winds leaving only a flash of bright red behind her, Yurch Ka’s yells were already audible. Vitka settled his spear and his face protector tight before running after Makka.

 

* * *

 

 

He should be close.

Yuuko wouldn’t be able to walk for too long unless Takashi had been close to her, which was quite unlikely despite being close when they were sitting at the lab. But she was six months pregnant with twins so something like that was far too improbable.

If his brain math was right, Yuuko would be approximately one point three kilometers away from his landing point which would be about thirty minutes or so of walking.

_Stop! This is madness! Everything is wrong! We must return--!_

Yuuri shut his brain’s voice. It was ok, everything was ok.

He would find Yuuko and walk her to the village. Lilia would surely welcome her at the circular room, give her thick furs and herbal-taste soups to warm her. Maybe after bringing his friend in, he could convince Vitka and other people to go with him to find his other friends and professor Cialdini.

Even maybe one of them would have recognized the riverbank and settled to either wait for someone else to gather up or to walk towards a known spot they recognized from the road trip.

“Yuuko!” oh, his voice trembled a little. Maybe it was because he hadn’t spoken a word since going back to the circular room after the bath “Yuuko-chan! Yuuko!”

His steps were muffled by the snow which would have been useful had it not been for the wind howling in his ears. What if Yuuko was answering his out loud yelling and he couldn’t hear it because of that stupid wind? And now it was fogging his already fogged up vision, luckily he had had the good idea of grabbing his glasses when he had left the circular room despite the darkness inside it.

Ugh, why hadn’t he grabbed something like one of those hats he had seen standing nearby one of the small niches in Lilia’s circular room.

Well, it wasn’t as he would be walking on and about for too long now according to his math. Just a few more steps around so he would find his friend and bring her to safety. It wouldn’t be too long, it wouldn’t be too long, it wouldn’t be too long, it wouldn’t be too long…

Something below his feet made a crack and he felt his stomach and himself to fall downwards by the invisible yet all-powerful gravity.

Now it wasn’t just the snowy wind howling in the woods but also Yuuri’s voice which resonated even in his own ears… before a thump announced his landing on a snow bank a few meters down, his heart pounding inside his ears while his eyes grew foggy on something else rather than the snow. He was feeling dizzy and numb.

His leg was numb, his leg was twisted, his leg was broken and his sight got blacked out.

 

* * *

 

 

Vitka wished he had had more time to prepare himself and had tied something on his feet to avoid drowning inside the snow up to his waist as he was in that moment.

The snowstorm hadn’t stopped yet, but was slowly and gradually easing just the tiniest bit while it had already left the ground covered in such a thick layer of cold he was hardly advancing at all and Makka wasn’t having any better luck for the matter: her little furry head was well noticeable amongst the white of the snow while her snout repeatedly snuffed snow out and high.

Makka stopped abruptly at the very border of the hollow and let out a long howl. Vitka had to move his arms and his arms all over to move as much snow aside as possible to get to her.

“Bright Mother, please don’t tell me…” he prayed under his breath.

His wolf kept howling while he made his way to the border with utmost difficulty. Vitka had to plant his spear as deep on the ground as his strong arms allowed him to, he didn’t want to fall into the deep hollow if he didn’t have something to hang on to.

The hunter removed his protector slightly to allow his eyes a wider vision spectrum at the risk of freezing his pointy nose… but he felt his breath freeze inside his throat.

It was Iu-uri. He couldn’t be mistaken with that hair as dark as the Night Sky which was the only thing visible outside of a small hill made of snow in which he was evidently buried.

“Iu-uri!” he called amongst the howls of his wolf “Iu-uri! Can you hear me?”

He didn’t move at all.

“Vitka!” voices behind him called

Mila, Yurch Ka and Gor-zhi were following the path Vitka had carved through the snow, also employing their weapons to widen the it. Gor-zhi and Yurch’ka tied a thick rope to one of the nearby birch tree and the other end to Vitya’s waist, a technique they were used to when hunting deer in the woods and needed to retrieve the prey from the hollow.

The three hunters helped Vitka slowly descend since he was the only one strong enough to carry a passed out Iu-uri.

He had almost lost hope when he realized Iu-uri’s body had the freezing temperature of a corpse until he felt his Song faintly drumming underneath the skin and onto his fingertips. Despite the precarious situation they were in, Vitka couldn’t help the blush furiously extending over his face underneath the protecting leather.

A Song was perhaps the most intimate of concepts and practices the Petsk had amongst them, something meant to be shared with a Cared only. While it was known the Song could tell the difference between death and life for an agonizing person, when revising it, it could only be done by feeling it on the hands or, less preferably, on the neck. But never on the chest, since it was there where the Song rested.

Vitka quickly brushed his thoughts off to unearth Iu-uri and tight him strongly to his body in order to be pulled up by his fellow hunters.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

Phichit was about to murder someone if he had to stand one more second without something warm on his hands.

Despite the sudden snowstorm paining Saint Petersburg, the team of scientists and officers had decided to cut the heating to the bare minimum inside the lab which was the set temperature when Yuuri had completed the experiment which according to his and his professor’s calculus had sent him into a void of space and time. That meant that everyone working inside the lab was condemned to freeze while working despite they all looked like tacky plushies with all those cloth layers underneath their lab coats.

Warm, barley-tinted and bitter coffee the catering brought by the police and distributed amongst everyone in the building every day had become Phichit’s only comfort the past days. The quantities he was drinking would scare the shit out of his parents had they been there.

However, not sleeping at night was a very cheap price to pay for a decent warmth during the day.

“Yuuko will be sneaking us some soup for lunch” Takashi seemed to be reading his mind, his voice was so low it almost came like a murmur

“Don’t you need to eat when you’re pregnant?” Phichit asked in the same low tone. As much as he appreciated his friend’s generosity, she was carrying three kids in her belly and he really wanted them to see them healthy.

“The police will take her to the hospital in the afternoon. She likes the food there better” Takashi replied with a smile, Phichit smiled back in complicity.

Phichit focused back on the board before him, noting every single writing religiously on his notebook’s side with slightly more pressure than needed to allow the numbers, signs and letters to press onto the page underneath.

That one had been the technique all of them had been using for the past week every time they were near Yuuri’s board equations: with the slight pressure trespassing the notebook and onto the following page, all they needed to do was to softly sketch graphite over it to have an exact copy when the Police confiscated the original.

“Kiddos, come get your bellies warm!” Celestino’s voice chanted announcing he had brought a fresh batch of nasty coffee.

It wasn’t time for Yuuko’s sneak-in soup yet so the three of them had to conform themselves with a couple of sandwiches from the catering service. Cold, to make things better.

“How are things in lab B?” Phichit asked in an attempt to make small talk to distract themselves and the officers from looking _too_ suspicious. With every sandwich bite and gulp of coffee, he would take advantage of the sound and softly rip the pages of his notebook off to immediately hide them in the insides of his sleeve.

“That burrow of mad men?” Celestino huffed in disgust “Thank God I stopped them from doing anything to the machine besides from moving it! They wanted to tear her open, but I got to stop them”

“What for in the first place?” Takeshi wondered with a mouthful of sandwich, keeping more pages inside his own sleeves

“Tch! They already want to build a copy of my boy’s project” the always-kind professor was basically spitting the words “Luckily I managed to get the Academy get Yuuri and the three of you the best grades you will ever get! You too, Nishigori! I spoke with coach Sasha about you”

Phichit let out a smile. His professor’s words were pure sunlight given the time they all were going through.

His grades and the possibility of losing the semester due to the incident had been the main point of concern for his parents when the police had finally given him the chance of calling them a few days ago. His mother’s screams were still resonating against his poor eardrums and he still wasn’t sure how an Excel grid had become more important than the fact his best friend disappeared in an act of the almighty Science.

Mom priorities, he guessed.

“Also,” Celestino got his attention back “I spoke to officer Kovalev and basically bargained for a couple of beds. Those sofas will be the death of my poor back. I'm too old for this crap…”

Both him and Takeshi snorted in laughter. The path before them, despite being barely on the building, was a harsh one but easing moments like these seemed to make it smoother.

 

* * *

 

 

For ever since the Petsk had lived along the Large River, they had told the stories of the Elders in a never-ending cycle for every Petsk who was willing to hear. Most of the time they were stories on how the World around them had been created.

How the Great Mother Earth and Great Father Sky had became Cared to one another after she had extended her trees to reach him and he had sent her wind and rain to caress and nourish her. He had given her a son to take care of her in the form of the Bright Father, he had taken a Cared himself with the Bright Mother.

Unfortunately, he had not been able to give her a child so she wouldn’t be alone. Seeing her cry and even disappear for days made his heart and warmth to struggle harshly. So, he decided to gift her little pieces and traces of himself to keep her company; doing so would mean he would no longer be able to be with his mother as closely as he had been, sometimes even allowing snow to fall over the Great Mother Earth in his absence.

But he did it because of love. And nothing seemed to be stronger in the World than it.

Every little Petsk had heard the story around the warm hearth every time the Bright Mother showed her full beauty. Including Vitka.

Maybe that was the reason why he just couldn’t help himself from hearing the mumbling of his fellow tribeswomen around him as he tried to focus on trying to do some new arrows, since Yurch Ka had lost plenty during their last hunting lesson the previous day.

All of them were mumbling the same.

“ _He truly has to be the Son of the Bright Mother if he survived such a snowstorm”_

_“Well, it would make sense: he appeared during a full Moon after all_

_“Maybe he is a gift from the Bright Father?”_

_“That would be beautiful. The Bright Father finally giving a child to his Cared!”_

_“Lili-ya told me she would speak to the Spirits to know the truth…”_

A cut of the small obsidian point on his finger made him snap and get his focus back on his arrows rather than on the nearby conversation.

Being a Great Hunter implied a certain level of logical reasoning and decision making during the harshest parts of an important Hunt. It was that reasoning Vitka was trying his best to hold on to before he let his own mind fly away. Because the worst part of all those things the Petsk women were saying was that he could perfectly picture them on Iu-uri.

After all, he had appeared in a full Moon night from the middle of nowhere, wearing the strangest garments he or any Petsk had ever seen with ever stranger amulets on his face. The weirdest thing about him were probably his features: a face pale as the face of the Bright Moon and hair as dark as the Night she proudly lived in. Maybe that was the reason he had ran away in the first place…

To go back home.

If life next to the Bright Mother had been any different from how it was amongst the Petsk, then trying to run back home and to her would be a reasonable thing to do for Iu-uri even if it was a complete madness for him and the tribespeople.

Vitka would also feel completely overwhelmed if he had been sent to a world completely different from his, from which he knew absolutely nothing or how to do anything… maybe Iu-uri didn’t even know how to hunt.

“Ah, Vitka” a feminine voice called behind him, the surprise earned him another cut from the arrow “Blessings of plenty… oh, my. Sorry!”

Being the advocate Healer she was, Lili-ya sat next to him immediately pulling a weaved strip made from soft plants and an ointment she always carried around no matter the day or the hour.

“Blessings of plenty” he answered with a smile “It’s just a scratch”

Lili-ya denied with her head, buttering his entire finger with the thick ointment and wrapping it so tightly it seemed she wanted to make it purple.

“Nonsense!” the Healer replied with her brows knitted in a frown “I need you without any scratches so you can focus on a task”

“As much as I would love to, I’m trying to get some arrows done right now…”

Lili-ya simply fixed a mocking gaze on him, one eyebrow higher than the other. A knot finished her healing, making Vitka jump in the process.

“Two cuts from barely tying arrows are the absolute worst coming from the Great Hunter” she stood up, straight as a pine tree and with a proud face “I have a better job that doesn’t require you potentially getting your fingers chopped”

Next thing Vitka knew, he was sitting in Lili-ya’s home stirring a pot she had left on the hearth as she was out in the woods trying to find wax. His pelts would surely get the smell of the herbs in the broth but maybe that could help him when he went out hunting the next day. Besides that, the Healer had asked one more thing from him.

Iu-uri was moving in his sleep, shaking and letting out low pained grunts. He was close enough so Vitka could see the pearls of sweat all over his face and the damp stains on his garments.

The Hunter quickly stopped his stirring and went to get a strip of cloth wet in a small bowl Lili-ya had left with molten snow. Once he was sure it was completely cold, he placed it on Iu-uri’s burning forehead, the other man shuddered in his sleep when the compress touched his skin and let out a small pained-scream. Vitka had to make sure the other man didn’t move his injured leg despite Lili-ya having tied some rocks around the splint she had placed after mending the bone to a more natural position.

“Sh, sh, please stay still” he didn’t know if Iu-uri could listen him in his state, but he kept murmuring easing words to him “You need to stay calm. Sh, sh, sh. Calm down”

Lili-ya had left him prepared a small bowl full of a medicinal infusion she called White Soup, which made almost any kind of pain go away after a few drinks. Vitka had had to drink from it a few times during one of the Petsk’s journey to the Sun Lands and while he could advocate for its quick efficacy, he also knew it to be so powerful it would most likely make the drinker dizzy, numb-limbed and quick to fall asleep no matter the hour or the place. What if he just ended making Iu-uri even more lost in his sleep? He would be out of pain but then it would be longer until he woke up and that would make Lili-ya even more worried…

Iu-uri _yelled_. An actual yell dripping pain in every note despite his eyes being wide shut.

Screw this, the Hunter thought and went to get the bowl once he made sure the injured leg hadn’t been moved.

He pinched Iu-uri’s nose to make his mouth involuntarily open wide gaping for air. He only dropped half of the half of the bowl, that should suffice to ‘sleep’ his pain away at least until the Bright Mother appeared in the Night.

The thread of his thoughts kept rolling.

Would the Bright Mother be mad at what had happened to her Son due to the Petsk’s lack of care? She was a powerful Spirit and could easily punish them by extending her coldness to their lands for moons to come, burrowing time from her Cared and making the days shorter. If she wanted, she could even guide beasts inside their homes and lead the fish away from their riverbanks.

Vitka was a Great Hunter of the Petsk. The responsibility of feeding the tribe, keeping them safe and preparing them to learn to live in harmony with their surroundings was completely on his shoulders. Iu-uri had become a Petsk the moment he arrived to the tribe, inherently getting under the wing of his care and Vitka had let him got hurt.

He had to change that.

“When you wake up, I know you will,” Vitka mumbled softly at Iu-uri while he wetted his forehead with a freshly damped cloth on molten snow “I promise you I will teach you everything you need to know in our tribe, so you can make the Bright Mother proud”

Iu-uri sighed softly in his sleep as any response.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Yuuri felt as if he was watching a movie about himself through an enormously wide TV.

In front of him was his twelve-year old self in front of a full-to-the-top bowl of _katsudon_ , surrounded by his parents and his sister. It was his birthday. There was a single long box on the table where his and the family’s _katsudon_ bowls were and a chocolate cake with candles on top.

His parents and his sister had just finished to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him and Little Him was quick to blow the candles, a wave of clapping followed along the ‘clic’ of a came

“Ah, already twelve… they grow up so fast!” his father teared up a little bit while revising the picture he had just taken

“Sweetie, why don’t you open your gift?” his mother urged.

Something quite unnecessary, if his current self had to be honest. Mini Yuuri pushed his _katsudon_ bowl aside in a gesture he rarely did just to get his little chubby hands on the long box, he started tearing the bright-blue wrap paper in what could be a very brutal way had it not been paper. He didn’t have to make any kind of effort to remember what lied behind those two layers of wrap, he remembered the exact words on the box: ORION 180, the whole Universe before your eyes!

Mini Yuuri gasped with surprise before he squeaked in pure joy, his face beaming when he hugged his parents and his sister.

“Glad you liked it, lil’ bro” Mari mumbled with her signature half-smile

“Thank you all so much!” he exclaimed; his happy tears were fusing with a wide smile that reached every corner of his face “This is the best gift ever!”

Ah, how could he ever forget that birthday? He had been asking for the Orion 180 ever since he was six years old after hearing one of his senpais talk about it in the science club. Toshiya and Hiroko had asked him what he wanted for his birthday and he had quietly replied the name of the telescope, a deep flush covering his cheeks and ears since he knew the _onsen_ wasn’t in a particularly good moment economically speaking and even he could notice.

Yet, he wasn’t good telling lies. For his seventh birthday he received a pop-up planetary book. For the eighth he got a fluorescent mobile for his room ceiling in the shape of a twirling galaxy. For the ninth, a NASA hoodie. For the tenth, an Einstein figurine. For the eleventh, a DVD on his favorite documentary on Quantum Physics.

But when he saw those bright ORION letters, he _knew_ what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

His dream-self’s vision blurred out of nowhere, he felt the ground underneath his feet loosen up and he found himself falling into the void. The fall suddenly stopped, showing him a new but still recognizable scenery.

A slightly-younger-Yuuri was sitting with his mother at Yu-Topia’s empty dining hall. Judging by their clothes and the amount of light coming into the room it must have been sometime during the late summer, a time during which the family inn wasn’t too busy.

Yuuri got close to his mother and younger self to realize they were sewing…more like Hiroko was teaching him how to sew. Ah, he remembered that: it was before he moved into Saint-Petersburg and his mother had considered he needed some extra skills before living on his own.

“You said this stitching works for buttons then?” his other-self asked Hiroko

His mother let out a gentle chuckle and nodded without taking her eyes away from her more complex and more colorful project. A pillowcase it seemed.

“Buttons, pockets and securing cloth folds” she answered heartily “Let’s say you buy a shirt that fits you well all over but around the waist. With that stitch, you can adjust it easily”

Both Yuuris blushed slightly.

While he was quite prone to lose control on his weight, he actually was in good shape ever since his teens when he would go running around Hasetsu, going into ballet and skating classes at the nearby studio and rink but no matter the amount of muscle built or the fat shed off his body, his waist and hips had always being quite pronounced like that of a girl. Thus, when buying a shirt, he would constantly have trouble with too-loose fabric around his tummy.

“I’m thinking I should also teach you the basics of knitting as well…” Hiroko mumbled, interrupting both the quietness in the room and Yuuri’s thoughts.

Then-Yuuri glanced at his mother with a confused face.

“Knitting?”

“Hmm, hmm” his mother murmured “It gets really cold in Russia, it would be nice if you know how to make yourself a cardigan, some socks or a scarf if the ones you’re taking aren’t enough. You could even make a nice thick blanket!”

Ah yes, he had read and heard how merciless the cold was in Russia. While he was kind-of used to see snow from across the window, having to wear a thick parka and snow boots every time he was out or having to stay all day long under the heated _kotatsu_ eating _onabe_. On top of that, he didn’t even lived in the most northern part of Japan colliding with Russia so most Japanese people living in Russia he had talked to had told him to multiplicate all of it by, easily, six times. They had all been right.

“I guess… that would be nice” Yuuri mumbled

His mother smiled fondly.

Maybe it was because he had been in an unknown place with unknown people in a, literally, unknown time but, Katsuki Hiroko looked particularly beautiful to him in that moment. He felt dampness start to form on his eyes.

His dream didn’t let him get too sentimental before the ground trembled again and he saw deep cracks forming on it that soon swallowed him into a different scene.

This one was from a normal day in college. Phichit and him were exiting one of the conference rooms where there had been a meeting from the International Student Group, they were talking to one of the freshmen students. Being watching the whole scene from an outsider’s perspective, Yuuri couldn’t help to let out a chuckle when he looked at Phichit, Guang-hong and himself being so wrapped in winter clothes they looked like walking onions.

“Then, do you have a project already?” Phichit wondered while tying his scarf tighter around his neck. No number of turtlenecks seemed to ease the chilliness for the Thai boy.

“Ah, yes” Guang-hong replied shyly, he only buttoned his jacket up. Both Yuuri and the Chinese boy were a little more used to the snow and the cold wasn’t as inclement with them. “I think it would be a good idea to get an idea at the museum”

“Why don’t we guide you there? It’s quite far and getting a grip of your location when in Saint Petersburg is quite hard” then-Yuuri offered to the young freshman.

The scene changed but without any movement from his body or his surroundings.

Before him were Phichit, Guang-hong and then-Yuuri walking amongst locals and tourists in large halls at the Prehistoric collection of the Hermitage Museum. The trio were standing before an exhibition which depicted a daily scene in the Neolithic as read on a plaque, something Yuuri could definitely confirm its accuracy after getting a glance at the village outside Lilia’s circular room.

While Phichit was fighting against a tangled set of earphones he had rented for a guided audio-tour, Guang-hong had seemed to leave his usual shyness at the entrance door. He was moving his hands in a frantic explanation and his mouth just couldn’t seem to stop spilling words related to the exhibition they were watching.

“…it was such an important stage of human history! Even more than the Paleolithic if you ask me: drawings on stone weren’t gonna get us anywhere after all. But this? We started to live in _actual_ houses, use _actual_ clothes instead of dead animals, agriculture became a thing and we started to have so many advanced tools its crazy! They also started to understand _concepts_ such as property, marriage, religion, _love…_!”

Phichit chuckled, interrupting both his untangling process and Guang-hong’s rambling.

“ _People_ right now don’t fully understand love,” his friend mocked “and you try to tell me a caveman did?”

Yuuri and then-Yuuri had to suppress their laughter when Guang-hong inflated his freckled cheeks and got red with visible anger.

“They did!” the freshman claimed “There are paintings and ceramics depicting love stories! Amulets! Graves where two people are buried with the same preparations which have been found in ‘wedding’ settings!”

Phichit gave Guang-hong one last mocking glance and Yuuri felt the ground beneath him shake anew. He tried uselessly to grab onto one of the security posts surrounding the exhibition but the void beneath swallowed him anyway.

Despite waiting for another of his memories be shown on a mental TV again, this next ‘scene’ was a complete nothing-ness from all sides.

It was as if he was stuck in a borderless room colored pitch-black but not dark at all. He could see his entire body with complete and full definition unlike as if he was staring at himself in the night. But he could also _feel_ the emptiness of the place.

There was nothing.

There was no one.

Just him.

Alone.

How could his own mind be so cruel as to show him memories of his family and friends only to strip them all away from him? He crumbled over his own body, cried, bawled and screamed for help.

Yuuri got surprised when someone actually answered his cries for help, making the room less black, slowly transitioning into a softly lit place.

It came in a strange language. Unknown and familiar at the same time. A soothing voice easing his anxiety down with gentle and soft murmurs from which, while he couldn’t get the words, he totally understood the _meaning_.

Tiredness and sleep flooded his entire being like a tsunami within him. But instead of fearing it, he welcomed the sensation and allowed his body and mind some actual rest.

 

* * *

 

 

“I have talked to the Great Spirits!”

The entire Petsk tribe, men, women and children kept the utmost silence and respect when the Healer spoke out loud from the entrance of their home. They all sat down on their knees as they shouldn’t be standing taller than she, the messenger of the Spirits.

“As all of you may know, several nights ago, our Great Hunter” her hand appointed Vitka “had an encounter with whom we thought was simply a man from another tribe. However, I have traveled to the Sanctuary and spoken to the Spirits, the Mothers and the Fathers. What they have told me is something I consider to be quite important to all of the Petsk”

Lili-ya’s green eyes fixed on a small group of young women who seemed to guess what she had discovered.

“The Bright Mother spoke to me about her Son. A child she has raised in a different place in a different time, a child with a great wisdom that far surpasses ours…”

“But he wandered into a snowstorm like an old manak!” an acute, childish voice interrupted the Healer’s

The entire village turned to see Yurch-ka with an annoyed glance which could easily beat the kid’s own. Lili-ya, accustomed as she was to the young hunter’s tantrums simply brushed the incident off and continued with her words.

“The world she raised him in is completely different from ours, our wisdom and his are too different: ours comes from the Earth and what lies on it, but his comes from the sky and what is within it” the Healer explained calmly, yet focusing her attention on Yurch-ka “This is the reason why the Bright Mother has asked us to help her son”

“Help him?” Mila asked in the crowd “But how? Isn’t he a Spirit as well?”

“True,” one of the other girls, Ana-Taya, complied “he doesn’t look like he comes from any tribe we know. He has the skin of the Bright Mother, the hair and the eyes of the Sky she stands on. He is a Spirit”

Vitka crouched a little bit in his place, playing with one of his hair strands. So what if Iu-uri was a powerful spirit or not? He wouldn’t say it out loud, but Yurch-ka was right: not going out in a snowstorm was common sense for any Petsk due to the world they were used to, but if Iu-uri had grew up in a different one, then it was clear he needed guidance or he wouldn’t be able to survive.

“The Bright Father is also a Spirit, yet he wasn’t able to give children to his Cared for ages until now” Lili-ya’s words were firm “Spirits _need_ of us as we need them. If Iu-uri is here to teach us something the least we can do is to teach something in return… which is why I have chosen Vitka to be the one to teach him our ways and provide him with the teaching and protection he needs”

Every Petsk either turned to see the Great Hunter or fixed their gazes on his back. Vitka shuddered lightly and almost invisibly underneath the pelts shielding him from the cold of the snow. He was used to the feeling of being in constant observation but not in the _way_ his fellow tribesman were doing it at the moment.

He moved from his sitting position to duck his entire body in respect for the Healer.

“I will gladly accept this task if you give it to me” Vitka mumbled just loud enough so the people around him could listen, but the quietness amongst his tribe made it seem as if he had screamed it.

Lili-ya thanked him with a deep bow of her head, making her braids and amulets ring in the process. After giving the Blessing to the tribe, each of the Petsk went back to their daily tasks, except for Vitka who stayed in his place after Lili-ya placed her hand over his shoulder.

“We are in a time when we are allowed to skip a few responsibilities: we can’t hunt as freely because of the younglings, we still have enough Winter food to hold until the Bright Father warms us with all his might” she spoke softly, almost as if the words were for herself “I wouldn’t have given you this task had I not believed you have enough time for doing so”

The Great Hunter agreed with a movement of his head

“It would also be nice if you could keep an eye on him again today… without White Soup if possible. He has been asleep for three more days than I thought”

Vitka felt his ears get warmed up with embarrassment.

The Healer gave him the Blessings one more time before heading out to the path leading to the opposite outskirt than where he lived. He had heard in the morning one of the youngest couple of Cared were having their first baby, Lili-ya would be having quite the workload for the rest of the day.

Vitka made his way to Lili-ya’s house, trying as hard as he could to ignore the gazes of the other Petsk who looked at him as if he had single-handedly killed a Manak. The sensation was there again, and he didn’t like it one bit.

The entrance door in Lili-ya’s home was tightly closed, something normal given that Iu-uri’s fever was still on the go and a broken bone exposed to the cold tended to hurt as if it hadn’t been mended at all. He opened it slowly, stripping almost immediately off his thick pelts, it was way too hot inside the locked home with the hearth lit up. He chuckled softly when he realized Lili-ya had taken the little pot of White Soup out of the house.

Iu-uri lied on his usual spot, covered in pelts up to his chin and only his splint leg came outside of the covers. Lili-ya had told him it was a little early to tell with full certainty, but it seemed to be mending well so far. He hoped so, otherwise his hunting lessons would be a pain.

Luckily, he hadn’t hurt anything else at the Hollow that would have made things more complicated like his hands, his knees or his eyes. Vitka had to admit he was really curious about his eyes: they were so deep, and they reflected the hearth perfectly…

“Ah…!” the hunter tripped and almost fell on his back when he realized Iu-uri was awake and with his eyes wide open observing his surroundings “Iu-uri. Blessings of plenty…”

Iu-uri didn’t answer, his gaze was unfocused like a lost cub. He tried to get up, but his elbows gave up under the effort and his back crashed on the sleeping pelts. Vitka rushed to his side and held him by the shoulders to help him sit.

“Sh, sh, sh” he did so slowly and gently so Iu-uri wouldn’t get hurt “Are you alright? Would you like some water? Water?”

Vitka even made the sounds of water getting down his throat so Iu-uri could understand. But instead of answering anything, Iu-uri focused his eyes on his own.

“Vitka…” Iu-uri mumbled.

His voice was rusty and nasal, the voice of someone who has been sick for too long. But that wasn’t what surprised him the most, rather the fact that this was the first time Iu-uri had called his name. And he liked how it sounded.

But the pleasure of it didn’t last too long.

Almost immediately, Iu-uri broke into tears, not even minding the fact his body was weak and his leg was badly hurt. He was bawling and weeping like he had done when he was sleep but it was worse now that he was awake. He was also speaking, in a language Vitka couldn’t understand any word but the sound of his voice was sad and pained.

Vitka didn’t know what else to do but to cuddle Iu-uri in his arms like he would do with a crying child, careful not to lie him on his chest. He mumbled soft words and traced spirals on his back to ease him down.

They stayed like that for several hours.

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

Yuuri was awfully bored.

Had he broken a leg back in his time, it would have meant for him to stay comfortably in his bed, watching Netflix on his laptop or playing videogames. He would have been excused from going to classes, Phichit would have cooked or, worst case scenario in which the Thai boy had burned something in the kitchen, ordered food.

Being a few thousand years back in time meant that none of those things was possible.

Lilia had left the house shortly after he had woken up, quickly speaking some words at him, from which he only understood ‘Vitka’ out of all the bunch and gave him a bowl of broth for breakfast. Then he was left alone.

She had been doing so for a couple of days already.

He had tried to move around a little but the…device around his leg was really heavy and his weakened body wasn’t too eager to cooperate with him. He was about to give up and go back to sleep until his hand found a bundle which he recognized as his cardigan.

Yuuri unwrapped it and found his pants, sweater, shirt, glasses and even his faithful little notebook inside of the bundle. Maybe Lilia or Vitka had left it there after his arrival and then after his last incident.

Looking back, he could now rationally admit he had had a break down. But his hallucinations, dreams or whatever had been his personal turning point and he had actually _accepted_ what had happened to him. He had provoked it on himself, he hadn’t affected his friends and his professor out of pure luck, maybe he had pushed the boundaries of science too far, but he wasn’t going to run away from the responsibility.

“Oh, thank god…!” he mumbled when he put on his glasses. The world was in full HD again.

Fortunately, no one had stepped on them or scrapped them by accident; the only flaw on them were some fingerprints on the lenses. The rest of his belongings were in good condition as well save for a little dirt.

“Hm, maybe I should finish this” he mumbled low taking a look at his notes on the functioning of his machine. Luckily, his mechanical pencil had also traveled with him and the notebook into the Neolithic “Results… of…experiment…Undetermined.”

Yeah, that sounded accurate.

“ _Chto ye la’ate?_ ” a voice asked next to him

Yuuri screeched and jumped out of surprise at first and then out of pain when he moved his injured leg. Vitka hurried to his side, getting him back to his ‘bed’ with gentleness.

“ _Ye ryadi?_ ” Vitka asked, probably something along the lines of ‘Are you okay?’ if Yuuri had understood the meaning correctly

“Don’t worry…I’m fine” Yuuri brushed the incident off with a gesture of his hand to aid the interpretation

It seemed the other man understood his gesture but still placed his leg underneath the covers with a care which could be interpreted as if Yuuri was made of pure glass. He thanked the gesture with a nod.

“ _Ye shdel?_ ” Vitka asked with an evidently concerned face

Yuuri nodded and mumbled a “Da”

During the first days, he had missed the Google translator terribly given how little he could understand Vitka’s conversation. The feeling hadn’t struck him ever since his first month in Saint Petersburg when he had a hard time even when buying a coffee at the cafeteria. Luckily, Vitka was quite the patient teacher and would usually stop on his tracks to mimic his words.

Vitka seemed satisfied with the answer and took the empty soup bowl to a large washing basin and started to rinse it. It had sort of become the routine between the two of them.

The other man would help him change his bandages, give him a quick wash with a damp piece of cloth, make sure he would drink the ‘tea’ Lilia had left for him, disappear for a little and then come back with a bunch of vegetables they would peel together, leave them to boil and wait for Lilia to come and eat with them. Yuuri actually looked forward to the peeling part due to some kind of strange potato he liked to examine.

The other man started to softly pull the bandages apart, a process he didn’t enjoy in the slightest. Getting even the quickest of glances of his unnaturally placed leg gave him the creeps… and he didn’t even see the full thing: Vitka would only change the ones holding the together the outer splint.

“I wonder how you learnt to do this…” he voiced out loud when Vitka was almost done

“ _Ka?_ ” Vitka’s silver hair and bone ornaments moved when he turned his head to see him in confusion

In a way, Yuuri knew saying ‘sorry, my bad’ wouldn’t ease the other man’s understanding so he kept his words for himself and pointed at the healing work instead.

“ _Iselsh?_ ” Vitka wondered after trying to decipher Yuuri’s gestures

The word he had mumbled almost sounded as if he was saying the word for ‘eating’ again. No, wait. That one was _shdel_ , a little bit different to the ear. Just to be sure, he pointed to his injured leg anew, making Vitka’s attention to focus on the bandaged parts.

“This” he explained slowly, caressing the bandages and pointing the small pots of ointments Vitka and Lilia constantly used “and that. Is it _iselsh_?”

Vitka nodded enthusiastically, an endearing gesture really. Yuuri couldn’t help but think about how much his attitudes sometimes resembled those of a small, excited child.

As if he was following Yuuri’s line of thoughts, Vitka stood up and sprinted towards a batch of jars Lilia kept on a corner. He picked a few in his arms and returned to where Yuuri was, kneeling down to get on his same head level. After placing the small jars on top of the covers so they wouldn’t get rolling on and about on the ground and break.

He picked an empty one and showed it to Yuuri as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world. Vitka pointed to it, as if he was specifically referring to the object’s material, a rough reddish-brown clay with some bumps interrupting its spiral-decorated surface.

“ _Lina_ ” he explained, rubbing his thumbs over it, encouraging Yuuri to do the same. Aside from the small bumps and decorations, he was surprised when the clay’s texture was soft to the touch.

“ _Lina_ ” Yuuri repeated, earning a nod and a smile from the man before him.

Judging by Vitka’s gestures, it was likely that he was solely referring to the clay the little container was made of. Vitka asked for the small object back. This time he gestured for Yuuri to look at the entire little jar.

“ _Yas_ ” Vitka said, his index now specifically pointing to the small opening on top of the jar, then traced its contours, scraping a little bit of the clay off with his nail as if by doing so, Yuuri would understand better.

‘Jar’ Yuuri thought.

“ _Yas_ ” he mumbled, a little unsecure of his pronunciation. No matter if he was a few thousand years back from his time, learning a new language was as hard as ever.

Unconsciously, perhaps remembering his first weeks studying Russian along other international students at college, he elongated his arm trying to reach his small notebook and pencil. Vocabulary came easier to him when he wrote it down somewhere rather than simply trying to memorize everything, especially when there were words with similar pronunciation like ‘eat’ and ‘heal’.

He didn’t even notice that what he was doing was a completely strange and foreign action in the place and time where he was. It was Vitka’s intense staring what brought him back to Earth, he was looking at Yuuri’s notes as if he had just seen a green monkey with tentacles instead of limbs.

“ _Nyepo isuk…_ ” he mumbled while fixing his stare on the notebook’s pages

“ _Isuk?_ ” Yuuri questioned

Vitka seemed to understand Yuuri’s doubts and placed his index on his _Results of experiment_ notes, brushing a little bit of leftover graphite and staining the page slightly.

“ _Isuk_ ” he stated with a serious expression, but his eyes still glistened with the curiosity of someone who wants further answers.

It was understandable how he would be so curious about it. Guiding himself from the decorations carved on the surface of the _yas_ , Vitka was probably only used to drawings similar to them like the intertwined spirals or doubled zigzags. Besides, if Guanghong and the rest of his Faculty were right, the first alphabetical system was created some thousand years further in the future.

“Words” he explained Vitka, underlining them with his own index.

“Uorgds” Vitka tried to pronounce. One of his slender and slightly rough fingers appointed to one of the drawings Yuuri had made as a primary sketch of one of his machine’s gears “Uorgds”

“Ah, no… drawing” Yuuri corrected “Drawing”

Vitka blinked a few times in confusion and pointed at the words and drawings simultaneously.

“Dar byeng. Uorgds. _Isuk_ ”

What had started as a boring day, turned to be one of the most enriching days for Yuuri and, he truly hoped, Vitka. They would have forgotten about having lunch had it not been for their stomachs growling close to the time the sun was going down outdoors.

“Uu fud?” Vitka asked with difficulty, constantly looking to the ceiling as he tried to get the words he had just learned back to his mind.

“ _Da pazh hal_ ” Yuuri answered with a smile.

 

* * *

 

 

 

“My friends,” Phichit mumbled “I believe we deserve some pizza”

Next to him, Yuuko laughed softly on her sofa, one of the greatest commodities she had received from the Saint Petersburg police department “If you can convince them of passing us a pizza, then fine by me”

That would be slightly difficult, but the Thai boy was quite optimistic on getting one.

Having complied obediently to all of the requests the police and the Russian scientists while working at the University lab, the police department seemed to ease down their strict watch on the small group to the point they moved them to a house for themselves. It seemed they had earned their trust.

Good, because they would need it.

They had already finished copying down the entire equation. Now, they could get to the _actual_ work.

“I’m with Phichit” Takeshi stated from the small kitchen “Rice is good and all but a change in dinner would be nice”

“Ah, I highly doubt they’ll have anything similar to the one my _nonna_ used to make back at home” Celestino mumbled next to Phichit, where they had been revising the last numbers and signs.

They had taken three weeks to copy the entire equation, Yuuko had already signed up for starting the difficult task to ‘solve’ the equation backwards to its original form, the initial form Yuuri had planned his machine from.

It may be their only chance at getting their friend back.

A phone started to ring in the small living room. Celestino gave a quick look to the screen to check the number before he hurried his students to keep quiet. It was Ivan, their assigned ‘caretaker’, a middle-aged man who seemed to always know when they were busy with their rescue planning.

“ _Privet_ ” Celestino greeted, putting the phone in speaker mode

“ _Privet_ ” a thick voice answered on the other side in a tired tone “ _Are you alone, professor?_ ”

“Hm, you could say that” Celestino lied “Yuuko is asleep, Takeshi is cooking dinner and Phichit is surely playing with his phone in his room”

The professor had stablished that policy whenever they were called by the police in an attempt to keep his students as safe as he possibly could.

“ _I see_ ” so far, Ivan never seemed to doubt of Celestino’s answers. He seemed content to just know he and his students just stayed in the house “ _Tell them to stay away from the windows though, the news just pulled the story back again this morning._ ”

While the public could easily forget something as big as what could easily be labeled as the greatest invention of the century, it seemed people in social media was constantly and daily feeding on Phichit’s video resulting in a constant stalking at the university and the neighborhood they had been settled at by the police after one of their ‘fans’ had followed the police transport all the way.

“Ah, I wouldn’t worry. They are quite tired from today”

“ _Good. Tomorrow we’re taking miss Nishigori to the gynecologist for her appointment. She will also have access to a call to her family_ ” Ivan stated “ _For the rest of you it will probably be during the weekend”_

“Ah, _spasibo Ivan_ ” Celestino thanked wholeheartedly, almost regretting lying to the man. The voice on the other side let out a ‘hmm’ as a vocal nod and hanged the phone, allowing the youngsters to release their breath “Well, Yuuko, do sent our best wishes to your and Yuuri’s family”

The young woman nodded with a discrete smile, denoting both her excitement for getting in contact with her family but also her sadness on having to speak to Yuuri’s family and not being able to give them good news.

“Soon we will have some good news for Mr. and Mrs. Katsuki” Celestino comforted her, gently patting her shoulder.

They just needed a little bit more of time.

 

* * *

 

 

Yurch’ka wasn’t a fan of fishing, nor of waiting for his pray hiding in the woods, nor sneaking amongst the trees to shoot birds.

All of those required a patience he severely lacked and just couldn’t compare at all to the excitement and fun of chasing large prey through the forest and the grasslands, feeling his blood carrying the highest of spirits at every step he took for getting close. It was only then when he could truly understand Vitka’s teachings on how the Spirits guided him when he hunted, he felt actual respect for his prey and actual thankfulness for the opportunity to feed his loved ones.

But he still was a _Malen Ok’hot_ , a little hunter, who still hadn’t got the chance to prove he was worthy of being a Hunter of the Petsk when the Manak arrived again into their territory. He truly wished he was preparing right now for such an important happening with his mentor, Vitka.

Had it not been because he seemed too entertained with his marsh man, clapping and getting excited at any new word they learnt as if he was taking care of a baby.

It had already passed a moon ever since Uri or whatever’s arrival and while he had to admit Vitka had done a relatively good job with him and his talking; at least the man could talk with tentative ease with Vitka, Lili-ya and the other Petsk. Still, he remembered the few times he had tried honey, a paste too sweet for his poor tongue which made him instantly flinch and those two were provoking him the exact same reaction.

“I just hope we won’t see a Caring ceremony too soon” he mumbled. While his voice wasn’t too loud, he could clearly see the fish he had managed to get close to the hook suddenly run away.

His thought wasn’t made from disgust, not at all.

Amongst the Petsk, the Sami, the Alma and basically all of the tribes Yurch’ka knew through trade, regarded Caring as something pretty much sacred, something that could only be done with a single person who had already been chosen by the Spirits even before Birth. And as the union had been done in Otherplace, the recipient it took form into didn’t matter: a body was a case and that was it.

It just gave him the creeps because, despite the fact he would never admit it, the other fatherly figure he had besides his Great Father was Vitka. And he didn’t have a lot of trust in Uri.

“Tch” he pulled his rod out of the water in frustration, but soon placed it back, creating round traces on the surface.

“No fish?”

The voice behind his back made him jump in fright and alert, slipping off the wet rocks and falling in the water, still freezing cold from the thaw. As soon as he got his head out of it to desperately gasp for air and warmth, his eyes found Uri before him. He was offering his hand to help him stand up.

“Forgive!” he apologized in a weird accent “Yurch’ka good?”

“Yeah, yeah” the younger one made it sound as if it hadn’t been a big deal.

He was wet to the bone and he needed to change quickly if he didn’t want to get a cold.

“Want pelt?” Uri offered while taking off the pelt covering his shoulders, which Yurch’ka recognized as Vitka’s outer pelt “You cold, you sick”

He was still dressing in those strange-colored pelts and clothes; they were far too light and thin for their weather. The thaw had already been on course for a moon already, but the thick cold low clouds would still show morning and evening, it wasn’t weird for the Petsk to find fish frozen in chunks of ice in their morning trips and firewood was still a precious good.

The foreign man didn’t seem to mind this at all and simply placed it gently on him.

“Fish go. Sorry” Uri apologized “I get fish!”

The chilly breeze coming from the woods making his bones shake didn’t stop Yurch’ka from letting out a mocking laugh at the other man.

“You?” he asked in an incredulous voice “You can barely stand up by yourself and those arms look thinner than an arrow, what can you even fish with them?”

Oh right.

It was evident that Uri hadn’t understand a thing of what he had said so he repeated it while pinching his sloppy arms, emphasizing his words one by one ‘You. Can’t. Fish’. The other man still took some time to fully comprehend his words but Yurch’ka started to suspect he hadn’t done so, because he started to chuckle.

“Can fish” he claimed with a smile on his face “You see”

What he did next was strange.

Yurch’ka always carried a basket with him whenever he went fishing, full of extra fishing threads in case his was too short, large flexible wooden rods if his own broke, wooden hooks he had craved in previous moons and rounded rocks in which he had managed to make a hole to get his thread through so it would have a little bit of weight. It was a heavy thing to carry around and even more to manage to hit his head with the long rods while walking.

Uri didn’t seem to care a shit of how much he had suffered carrying that thing on his back all the way to his fishing spot as he simply tipped it over and spread his stuff all over the ground as if it was nothing, only picking up the thread rolls.

“Now what the fuck are you doing?!” Yurch’ka scandalized, immediately bending down to gather up his stuff but his basket and thread were gone. Uri had run with it to a high point and started to tie strands of his thread on the sides of the basket.

Uri, seemingly satisfied with his craftwork, threw it away to the middle of the water, farther than what Yurch’ka would usually manage but also the part which seemed to have lured more fishes in.

The basket seemed to stay still for a moment on the surface of the water before it suddenly started to move against the current and at a different speed at that. A fish had gotten trapped in it. On top of his spot, Uri was pulling the threads with little to no result.

“Help!” he yelled, reminding Yurch’ka his leg was still healing, and his body was weak from being in bed for so long.

The _malen ok’hot_ climbed to the high spot and helped him pull, quickly earning harsh burns on his palms, not much worse than Uri’s. What the fuck had he catch? It was heavy as if the fish carried rocks in his belly and his arms weren’t enough to get it off the water.

The basket advanced towards them with a lot more fluidity, making him think that maybe his arms had finally showed off their strength, but a single look over his shoulder made him realize it was Vitka who had switch placed with Uri and was pulling three strings at the same time as if it was nothing.

‘I’m gonna get a scolding for not taking care of this guy, for sure’ he thought.

As soon as the basket and its load were out of the water, Vitka seemed to fulfill his prediction: the hunter turned to him with a severe expression, placing Uri behind his back in a protective manner.

“Why on earth would you make him fish with something so dangerous when he has just left Lili-ya’s house?” Vitka’s words came out tight and sharp, as if he was gathering all of his self-control and not slap him or something.

“I didn’t!” Yurch-ka defended himself “He made me fall into the water when he arrived, then he said he would help me catch back what I lost, I told him it was useless and instead of listening to me, he throws my stuff away and sinks my basket in the water! If there’s anyone deserving this, is him!”

He ended his word-throw up with a finger pointing at Uri who had been discreetly observing the quarrel from behind the Great Hunter’s back after puckering the basket in an ugly manner so their catch wouldn’t jump back into the water. While Yurch-ka’s words had spilled too fast and had been too many, he seemed to understand that the youngster was accusing him.

Uri tapped Vitka’s shoulder to call his attention back and nodded.

“He fall water, I say I help” Uri explained with his voice and hands in a very slow pace, thinking his words “Many fish, I not catch. Basket catch many fish I can”

Yurch-ka was thinking on making an alter to the Bright Mother so she would either give her son more knowledge of the Petsk words or give him more patience because every time he opened his mouth, he got freaked out for seeing someone older than him speaking like a baby.

“Many fish?” Vitka wondered on Uri’s last words

“Yes! More than stick!”

Did he mean ‘more than with a rod’?

Curious, Vitka and Yurch-ka bent down to get a look at the basket’s insides. Movement was still felt lightly through the woven fibers Uri had tied in an unpleasing crumple.

As part of the Petsk, they were used to hard conditions from one winter to another, to having little from their daily hunts and gatherings. That was one of the reasons they had a Great Hunter, so they could ensure the feeding of the entire community.

The quantity of fish achieved by Uri in a single try, was the equivalent of three days of early rising and boring long days by the river, Yurch’ka calculated.

On his side, Vitka was even more surprised.

“How did you catch so many?” he asked Uri, but he didn’t seem to understand much “Are you also a Hunter in the place you come from? A hunter like me, like Yurch’ka? Have the Bright Ones teach you hunt or magic?”

Uri smiled, evidently not understanding the entirety of Vitka’s words.

“I know things” he answered simply

Yurch’ka knew, deep in his gut and much to his dismay, this guy wasn’t as helpless as he and the rest of his tribe had thought in the beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who would have thought college was so time-consuming?  
> *laughs nervously*  
> *sobs*  
> Anyway, I really tried working on finishing this multiple times but as it is a "transitional" chapter, I really just couldn't grasp inspiration. I'll bring you the next chapter much faster, promise.  
> Hope you enjoy *bows*

**Author's Note:**

> I know some people are still expecting My Blossoming Love's next chapter but I really needed to get this out of my system >-< !!!  
> Long story short, I watched 10,000 AC and this idea started to play in my mind, so enjoy!  
> *bows*


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